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Sgouros on the census data
8:32AM ON
01/08/2008
BY
Dave Segal
Tom’s the most astute policy analysis in the state. Here’s his take on the interim census data that showed that RI lost population this year, and how it relates to state economic and social policy.
To begin with, our population has apparently been declining since sometime around the start of 2004. First lesson: people who said the crazy real estate market of 2002-2006 was because of population shifts could hardly have been more wrong. As the fallout from the sub-prime mess is showing us, what we saw was a classic speculative bubble in housing, just like the one we experienced in 1985-1989. More likely, the bubble was the cause of people leaving, as housing became more expensive.
Another fact: many more people have moved out of Massachusetts over the past five years than have moved out of Rhode Island, after adjusting for the population. Over 300,000 people decamped from the Bay State since 2000, ten times as many as left here. (They have about six and a half times our population.) They have had more foreign immigrants than us, though not enough to make up the difference. So what does? Natural causes: our birth rate is lower and our death rate is higher. Exactly why is hard to say (the median age is the same in the two states) but that’s what the data says.
Of course, we’re also a poorer and more urban state than they are, so I did a second comparison, looking only at the five most populous counties in Massachusetts, and found my second lesson. Guess what? Massachusetts looks a lot more like Rhode Island when you leave out the Berkshires. When you do this comparison, you see a massive exodus from urban Massachusetts starting in 2002 — a couple of years before us — and only beginning to taper off now. Third lesson: people who think that Massachusetts has some magic that we don’t are deluding themselves, or trying to delude you.
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