With almost every TIGC post I write, a bunch of stuff usually winds up on the proverbial cutting-room floor. There are various reasons for this. One is that I generally try to hold the length of my posts to around a thousand words. Another is that sometimes I get a little sloppy and forget to include something that I actually meant to use. Yet another is that sometimes I just get tired and need to stop. What can I tell you? I’m old.
However, my most recent post — “Mapping the death of rural Georgia” — generated quite a bit of interest and a fair number of questions, and I’ve decided to tackle at least some of them in this follow-up post.
First, a factoid I actually meant to include in the original post — some state-level numbers. I was focused on mapping the county-level picture over the past 30 years and completely neglected to include higher-level statewide numbers. My bad. I’ll start here with this graph, which charts births and deaths for the 29-county Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area and the other 130 Georgia counties from 1994 through 2024.
The graph should be easy enough to follow, but I’ll emphasize a few things. Going back to 1994 (the earliest year for which the Georgia Department of Public Health has data), births in the Atlanta MSA (the solid blue line) and the other 130 counties (red) were very comparable — a difference of less than 4,000. But then the birth lines diverged dramatically and by 2020 the difference in births was approaching 20,000.
I don’t want to get too deeply into cause-and-effect here, but it seems fair to note that the 1990s were a huge boom period for Metro Atlanta generally. Fueled in significant measure by winning the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta rode that event and all the investment that came with it to a period of massive business and economic expansion. Meanwhile, the rest of the state, especially south of Macon, was having to confront the effects of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), which took effect on January 1, 1994. I’m still trying to round up reliable job loss numbers on this, but I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to suggest that the loss of various types of small-town manufacturing plants was a body blow to rural Georgia and contributed to the flattening out of the number of births outside Atlanta starting around 2000.
Then, in 2001, came 9/11 and the dot-com bubble. That one-two punch arguably flattened Metro Atlanta’s birth-line for the next couple of years, but it got back on track in about 2004 and was once again widening the birth gap with the rest of Georgia. Then, of course, the Great Recession hit in 2007 and knocked the wind out of birth rates all over the state (and, by universal assessment, nearly all the rest of the world).
The number of deaths (the red and blue dashed lines), meanwhile, was rising steadily from 1994 on — in the Atlanta MSA mostly because of sheer population growth and in the other 130 counties largely because the population was getting older and, as actual demographers like to say, “aging out” of the population.
Let me close out this section with a few hard numbers and a couple of takeaways. The table at right shows births and deaths for the three Covid years and for 2024. During the Covid years, the 130 counties outside the Atlanta MSA had nearly 10,000 more burials than births. As of last year, “Notlanna,” as I’ve come to call it, booked more babies than deaths, but not by much. Of the more than 29,000 “net births” in Georgia that year, fewer than 2,500 took place outside Atlanta.
Okay, enough of that. Next question?
Yeah, how did we get in this mess? Well, that’s a whole ‘nother post — and probably a couple of chapters in the book. I dealt with some of the external factors and forces above and in my last post. But here I’ll add that we’re paying the price for about a half-century of bipartisan political and policy failures that have allowed what were once manageable tactical problems to fester and grow into a set of strategic nightmares that defy conventional solutions. More later.
Is there a way out of this mess? How do you fix it? That too is another post and another couple of chapters in the book. I do have some ideas, but I’m pretty sure nobody will like a single one of them. Here’s one suggestion. Whenever a new political jurisdiction is proposed in the General Assembly, they always (to the best of my knowledge) require that a feasibility or viability study be conducted. Would the new municipality have a sufficient tax base? A big enough population? What kind of impact would its creation have on its county and on neighboring areas? My recommendation, as a starting point, would be that the General Assembly fund the same kind of viability studies for all 159 existing counties and, maybe as a second phase, most of the cities and towns in those counties. I put the odds that this will happen at less than zero. Why? Because our state legislators, especially those representing rural Georgia, know exactly what those studies would show. Then they’d be forced to actually do something — and, Lord knows, we wouldn’t want that.
I’ll close this out with the map below, which is aimed at answering a question I got from several people — namely, how’d my county do? The map is interactive and mousing over individual counties will give you their births, deaths, and “net births” for 2024. The color coding isn’t quite as precise as I’d like it to be, but, basically, green denotes more births than deaths and red is the opposite. The darker the color, the bigger the difference; the paler the color, the closer a county is to break-even.
Comments
2 responses to “Cutting-room floor factoids from my last post”
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One way out of this problem is for people in rural Georgia quit voting against their best interests. Just because a person has a R next to their name does not mean they have the best policy position for you. Extending Medicaid statewide is a good example. Putting 140 million dollars out of the state budget toward private education is another.
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This is important information, and I expect the pattern of urban growth vs. rural loss is repeated across the country.
A minor point: While the trend lines in the first chart are clear, I think charting the same data points per capita rather than raw numbers would provide some important perspective.
Cutting-room floor factoids from my last post
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Comments
2 responses to “Cutting-room floor factoids from my last post”
-
One way out of this problem is for people in rural Georgia quit voting against their best interests. Just because a person has a R next to their name does not mean they have the best policy position for you. Extending Medicaid statewide is a good example. Putting 140 million dollars out of the state budget toward private education is another.
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This is important information, and I expect the pattern of urban growth vs. rural loss is repeated across the country.
A minor point: While the trend lines in the first chart are clear, I think charting the same data points per capita rather than raw numbers would provide some important perspective.
Leave a Reply
Cutting-room floor factoids from my last post
Published on
Comments
2 responses to “Cutting-room floor factoids from my last post”
-
One way out of this problem is for people in rural Georgia quit voting against their best interests. Just because a person has a R next to their name does not mean they have the best policy position for you. Extending Medicaid statewide is a good example. Putting 140 million dollars out of the state budget toward private education is another.
-
This is important information, and I expect the pattern of urban growth vs. rural loss is repeated across the country.
A minor point: While the trend lines in the first chart are clear, I think charting the same data points per capita rather than raw numbers would provide some important perspective.
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