Deaths of white people outnumbered births for the very first time in US history, the Census Bureau revealed Thursday. The census predicts that significant drops in birth rates v death rates will be regular by 2025.
The new 2012 annual census calculated births minus deaths as of July 2012 and saw a decrease of about 12,400 people out of 198 million non-Hispanic whites in the country.
Several demographers have pointed out that no other racial group in the US experienced a similar drop.
Such a natural decrease within the white population is the first of its kind and was not even observed in the US during wars or Depression, the Washington Post reported.
Non-Hispanic whites in the US are older than other groups, with a median age of 42. In comparison, the median age for Asians is 34, for African Americans, it is under 32, and for Hispanics it is under 28.
“We’re jumping the gun on a long, slow decline of our white population, which is going to characterize this century,” demographer with the Brookings Institution William Frey, who analyzed the census data, told the Washington Post.
The data also revealed that half of the America’s under-5 age group is made up of racial and ethnic minorities, amounting to 49.9 percent in 2012.
If the current rate of growth continues, then the whites in the under-5 group will become a minority in 2013-14, the Census Bureau’s acting director Thomas Mesenbourg told AP.
The Bureau also predicts that just in five years minorities will become the majority of children under 18.
Demographic and economic factors behind drop in birth rates
The decline in births rates for the past several years include demographic and economic factors.
One reason is women with college degrees are choosing careers and are postponing getting married and having kids till at least late into their 20s. And census shows that if women have children later in life they will opt to have fewer of them, or be unable to have more.
Also, data revealed that white women are more likely to be childless than Hispanic or African American women.
The economic recession that hit the US in 2007 also had a negative impact on birth rates, as more white women believed that they could not afford to have more kids.
The 2012 fall in white births versus deaths ratio is not the first alarming number that was released to the public this past couple of years. >>MORE<<
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