50 years ago, scientists predicted steady U.S. population growth

Information outflowScience News, June 5, 1971

The United States’ population is growing at a rate of one percent a year, and even with lower fertility rates this trend will probably continue. If the fertility rate dropped to 2.1 children per woman, the population of the country would level off in the year 2037 at 267 million. But, this would require an unlikely 50 percent decrease in the birth rate.

Update

Those projections, based on 1970 census data, recently veered off course. As of April 2020, about 331.5 million people lived in the United States, according to census data. But from July  2019 to July 2020, the population

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