Numbering the nation.(THE STRAGGLER)(American population)

 
  When Mr. Johnson felt his fancy, or fancied he felt it, disordered, 
  his constant recurrence was to the study of arithmetic, and one day 
  that he was totally confined to his chamber, and I inquired what he 
  had been doing to divert himself, he showed me a calculation which I 
  could scarce be made to understand, so vast was the plan of it, and so 
  very intricate were the figures: no other, indeed, than that the 
  national debt, computing it at one hundred and eighty millions 
  sterling, would, if converted into silver, serve to make a meridian of 
  that metal, I forgot how broad, for the globe of the whole earth, the 
  real globe. 
  --Mrs. Thrale's Anecdotes 

JUST so with the humble Straggler. If the Census Bureau is to be believed, the resident population of these United States has just passed through the 300 million mark. Reading of this, my fancy became disordered, driving me to seek refuge in arithmetic. Here I shall try to reconstruct my train of thought.

There seems to be no mood of national rejoicing for this demographic milestone, as there was back in 1967 when the "census clock" in the Commerce Department registered 200 million. On that occasion, a crowd in the lobby of the building broke into cheers and applause, and Lyndon Johnson made a celebratory speech.

What was not to like? The Americans of 1967 believed their nation to be a good one, so that the more populous she became, the better for humanity. They did not worry about "diversity," separation, and social discord between groups. Why should they? There were only two distinct groups of any numerical consequence: white Americans at 88.6 percent of the population and black Americans at 10.5 percent (on the 1960 census figures). The number for white Americans was actually an advance of 8 percentage points on the 1790 figure, when almost one in five of the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies was black. In any case, when the 200 millionth American showed up, the civil rights revolution was under way. Everyone knew that once legal disabilities against them had been swept aside, black Americans would merge peacefully into the general mass of citizens, and race would soon be of interest only to the manufacturers of cosmetic products. We should be a single harmonious nation, marching forward to a radiant future, our alabaster cities gleaming in the sun, our numbers ever swelling!

We have lost a great deal of innocence since 1967, become wiser and more thoughtful. We are less trustful of government and its statistics, too. Is the Census Bureau to be believed? There are demographers who think not. There is, for instance, Virginia Abernethy, professor emerita of anthropology at Vanderbilt. Professor Abernethy believes that the 300 million mark was actually passed six years ago, and that present population is about 327 million. She has published a paper to make her argument. She also questions the estimates of future population put out by the feds. The Census Bureau currently anticipates a U.S. population of 600 million at the end of this century. That, notes Professor Abernethy, is already 100 million greater than the 1994 estimate. She ...