Humans tell stories about humans.
It’s a basic rule of communication, and it’s worked pretty well for everybody from Shakespeare to Tony Morrison to Dr. Seuss.
But when it comes to telling stories about lots of humans – particularly lots of humans who live in the same general area – a better narrator can be numbers.
That’s what makes new data issued this month by the U.S. Census Bureau so important. The numbers, based on results of the 2020 Census and the ongoing American Community Survey, don’t say any one thing about any one person, but they do say a lot about a lot of us.
Who do we live with? How poor are our kids and our seniors? What languages do we speak at home? How long are our commutes?
The basics are simple: The Census Bureau totes up the entire country once every 10 years in a headcount that provides a well-educated guess about the numbers of people who live in every state, county and city. The census also tracks racial and ethnic identities and, recently, the countries our families came from.
But newly released census data also layers in results from the American Community Survey, which is the bureau’s smaller, year-by-year questionnaire about dozens of topics, everything from education to health insurance to how we make a living. Those numbers – used by the federal government to determine how and where to spend money – say a lot about how we live.
On the surface, the new numbers solidify two well-known local facts:
First, the overall population of the region that includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties is shrinking. Sure, there’s been some moving within the four counties, and not all four counties are in decline, but the overall headcount is down slightly in recent years, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Second, Southern California remains arguably the most racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse region in a wildly diverse nation.
But other numbers get into commuting and aging…
Read the full article here