The (horribly ugly) Census Bureau HQ, Suitland, MD

Oh, dear. Yet another reason to worry about Vermont: It’s barely growing.

In the year ending last July 1, the state’s population had grown by a mere 711 people, according to the latest estimates from the Census Bureau. Worse (or so it seems), that meager growth came about only because births outnumbered deaths, not because people moved into the state. In fact, 554 more Vermonters moved out than newcomers moved in.

Come to think of it, the births didn’t outnumber the deaths by much. Compared to folks in most other states, Vermonters aren’t having many babies.

What are we doing wrong?

Well, to start with, maybe taking stories like this too seriously.

Or at least by taking them as entirely bad news. A stable population does present certain problems. But it also presents opportunities, a possibility unmentioned in the media coverage of the Census Bureau’s announcement last week.

No, there is no suggestion here that the journalists and/or their bosses were in any way unethical, lazy, or ignorant. To begin with, the reporters doing the stories may simply have been rushed; what with all the layoffs, there aren’t enough of them to do the job right. At worst, they followed the conventional – and somewhat provincial – wisdom: Bigger is better, meaning not getting bigger is worse; also whatever happens here doesn’t happen anywhere else, or if it does we don’t care.

Thus both the Burlington Free Press story by Matt Sutkoski and the Associated Press story that ran in the Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus noted that three states actually lost population last year, but mentioned only Vermont’s net domestic in-out-migration loss, either last year or over the course of the decade, as though it illustrated an unusual situation.

(Actually, over the decade, 3.877 more people moved into Vermont than out of it. It was just net domestic migration – people moving to and from another state – that fell, by 1,124. Immigrants from other countries made up the difference)

But the Census Bureau data show that more Americans moved out of than into 13 other states, including California, over the last decade, and 20 had more domestic out-migration than in-migration in the year ending July 1.

In fact, in many states, including such recently fast-growing places as Nevada and Florida, the total net out-migration – whether to another state or another country – was far greater than Vermont’s, even proportionately to their larger populations. What’s happening here does not appear to be all that unusual.

Nor baffling, By not growing in population, Vermont is very much ike the people and places with whom and with which it is comparable. Those people are American-born non-Hispanic whites, and there are not going to be more of them – anywhere –in the future than there are now.

According to another recently-released Census Bureau report, were it not for immigration (referring here only to immigration from other countries), the population of the United States would decline by 2050. Being far from the centers of immigration (mostly Latin America) and not too inviting to those immigrants (largely because of the weather) Vermont is likely to remain dominated by boring white Anglos, precisely the kind of folks who don’t do much reproducing.

Worse (from the perspective of those who think population growth is necessary), Vermont is disproportionately full of relatively affluent, relatively well-educated boring white Anglos. People like that aren’t reproducing enough to replace themselves all over the world. There’s little reason to suppose that the Vermonters among them are about to act much differently.

Meaning they might as well get used to living in a state with a stable population. It looks as though it’s here to stay.

As the conventional, established, reaction to the news indicated, a non-growing population raises some potential problems. At the Free Press, reporter Sutkoski quite sensibly contacted a conventional, established, business consultant, Richard Heaps of Northern Economic Consulting, Inc, who provided the conventional, established, analysis.

“Conventional, established,” here is description, not insult. Much of what Heaps said should not be dismissed. Slow population growth means slow growth in the labor force, he noted, which in turn “means it’s tougher to expand a business in Vermont than it would be otherwise,” so some businesses might expand elsewhere.

So they might. On the other hand, with a smaller labor force, a state wouldn’t need that many job openings to maintain full employment. A small, select, fully employed work force would seem to be the hallmark of a prosperous state, unless one assumes that bigger is always richer.

But were that the case, a big, heavy, bicycle would cost more than a very light one. It uses more material and probably requires more workers to build it. As everyone knows, though, the opposite is the case: the lightweight bike costs much more, its value enhanced by the intelligence that figured out how to make it so light.

What was missing from the coverage was some reaction from less conventional experts who might have pointed out the possible advantages of a stable population, or at least the reasons why it need not be inconsistent with greater prosperity. Because only a holiday and the weekend have passed since those stories appeared, no such expert will be quoted here, either. For future reference, though, one might try the folks at Worldwatch Institute, or economist Herman Daly. Their outlook need not be accepted as revealed truth; it might be part of the conversation.

Because the earth is finite. Human inventiveness can expand the limits imposed by that finitude, and it has. But it can only do so up to a point. The contention that the point is approaching or has been reached is not easily dismissed.

Meaning that the country, city, or state that can show the world how to get richer and happier without getting much more populous could get very rich indeed.

(NOTE: Yes, if you thought you remembered that last Monday’s post indicated that this one would deal with state tax matters, you remembered correctly. Come back Wednesday.

And to repeat: No post this Friday morning. Enjoy your hangovers.)

Did you know that in 2007, 122 people who lived in Alabama had lived in Vermont a year earlier? And that 65 Vermonters had been Alabamians in 2006?

Or so says the Census Bureau.

The bet here is that you didn’t know. Now you do. Do you care? Should you?

Probably no to both those questions, too. In and of itself, those statistics mean little, if anything. And if they do mean anything, it’s not clear just what that anything is.

That’s a good rule to keep in mind when analyzing population statistics, especially interim population statistics, which are estimates and projections, not hard numbers. (Actually, the Census itself is something of an estimate and projection, too; but much less).

For instance, we (sort of) know how many people moved between Alabama and Vermont. We have no idea who they are or why they moved. As Will Sawyer, the manager of the Vermont Data Center at the University of Vermont’s Center for Rural Studies noted (via email), “Secondary data only tells us so much.  The real answers are in people’s stories on the ground.”

Meaningful or not, interim population info is interesting, and as long as one resists the temptation to over-interpret, possibly useful.

Also, as Sawyer indicated, complex, with too many details and contradictions to examine in one sitting. So this will be the first of several postings over the next few weeks examining the interim numbers that the Census Bureau released earlier this month. In these exercises, we will stick to the numbers as much as possible, but a certain amount of conjecture will be inevitable.

Meaningful or not, those Alabama-Vermont numbers are representative. By and large, more people are moving from Vermont to other states than from other states to Vermont.

The state’s population is growing, if slowly, due to natural increase (more births than deaths) and to immigration from other countries. But there is “a net domestic migration decrease (state to state) throughout Vermont,” in the words of Will Sawyer’s memo to Vermont census data contacts.

Are we doing something wrong?

Maybe. But we’re also in the Northeast, from which people have been moving elsewhere for decades.

No great mystery here. The Northeast is older, colder, and more crowded. Ever since there has been an America, people have been moving from the more settled to the less settled areas. (Come to think of it, they were doing this before there was an America; that’s why there is an America.

It’s demography’s version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which holds that, in a closed system, heat and energy flow from the warmer to the colder spots (but it doesn’t all get there, meaning entropy rules, so why bother to do anything at all?). In this case, though, the movement is from the colder to the warmer spots, not to mention that the world is not a closed system.

Here’s what might be a contradiction, though. People may move from the more crowded regions, but they move to the more crowded parts of those less crowded regions. Meaning that (here’s some of that inevitable conjecture) most of those Vermonters who moved to Alabama went from rural or small-town Vermont to Birmingham or Mobile and their suburbs, not to rural or small-town Alabama.

Here we have a possible (more conjecture) solution to an apparent mystery in the latest Census numbers, which showed small population declines in the southern part of the state.

That’s not the mystery. After all, those are rural counties, and rural counties are losing population all over the country, especially if, as is the case here, many residents earned their keep in small factories, also on the decline nationwide.

But then why isn’t the Northeast Kingdom losing population? Orleans, Caledonia, and Essex Counties are rural, with some manufacturing jobs. Essex did lose a handful of people. But the other two counties grew. What have St. Johnsbury and Newport got that Bennington and Brattleboro don’t?

Maybe it’s what they don’t have that Bennington and Brattleboro do: Nearby cities.

People tend to move to nearby places. Specifically, people tend to move from rural and small town areas to the nearest metropolitan area. More Vermonters move to New Hampshire (3,772 in 2007) than vice versa (2,267). But they didn’t just move to “New Hampshire” as some abstract entity. Most of them moved to the Manchester, Nashua, Portsmouth, or Concord areas. That’s where the jobs are.

A fairly short hop from Brattleboro, and not that far from Bennington. The cities of northern Massachusetts aren’t far, either. But all of them are much farther from the Northeast Kingdom. For all sorts of reasons – family, friends, familiarity, inertia – many people like to stick as close to home as possible. And there’s not much point in moving from Caledonia or Essex County, Vermont, to Coos County, New Hampshire, where the economic outlook is no better.

Gregory “Rex” Burke, the executive director of the Bennington County Regional Commission, said his county is losing population for several reasons, one of which might be that what he called “the Vermont mystique” keeps prices high.

This makes sense. “Vermont” is surely a state and perhaps a state of mind. But it has also become a brand. A product made in Vermont is slightly more desirable than the same product would be if it were made elsewhere. The same is true of real estate. By and large, this is good for the state’s economy. But as the words to the 1944 Mills Brothers hit Till Then pointed out, “every gain must have a loss.” A house or land just over the line in Rensselaer County, New York, might be slightly cheaper than a comparable property in Bennington County simply because it isn’t in Vermont, and Burke said some (now former) Vermonters have taken advantage of the lower prices.

A closer look at the numbers indicates that simply pointing out the population decline in Bennington County is insufficient. Burke and his assistant, Jim Sullivan, noted that the northern part of the county is growing, thanks to second home development, ski areas and other tourist amenities. It’s southern Bennington County, and especially the town of Bennington itself, one of the places which has lost manufacturing jobs.

“The town of Bennington lost 400 (manufacturing) jobs in ten years,” Sullivan said. “Then before the recession came we had an increase of 200. We thought we were going to see population growth along with this manufacturing growth.”

Needless to say, what they thought did not come to pass, for reasons not at all peculiar to Bennington or to Vermont. Those numbers do indicate, though, that even the parts of Vermont that are losing population are hardly fading away, Even the population declines, Sullivan said, that “we really don’t know whether it’s a blip or the beginning of some new trend.”

To recap, there is much we don’t know, and much more to discuss—about jobs and taxes, about why Chittenden County is both Vermont’s fastest-growing and the county which more people leave, about who stays, who goes, who arrives, and why, about whether population growth is necessary or even desirable in the first place.

More coming anon.