Justin Fox, Columnist

America's Heartland Has Moved to the South and West

The nation's population has shifted away from the traditional centers of power.

January 4, 2018 at 3:11 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Growing and growing.
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Sometime this year, the population of the Southern U.S. will surpass that of the Midwest and Northeast combined.

How did I arrive at this assertion? Last July 1, according to the state population estimates released last month by the Census Bureau, there were an estimated 124.6 million people living in the Midwest and Northeast and 123.7 million in the South. Next July 1, if the regions continue growing at the rates that they have since 2010, the numbers will be almost even at 125 million, with the South presumably pulling away after that. Meanwhile, the West -- which surpassed the Northeast in population in the 1980s and the Midwest in the 2000s -- had 77.4 million inhabitants as of last July and has been growing almost as fast as the South.