Thursday, August 22, 2024

This Should Be Easy to Find

 A spreadsheet with the U.S. population by decade from 1790 to 2020,  It is coubtless somewherer in the Census Bureau's website but obscured by thousands of other tables.  I asked ChatGPT and it told me to visit links to that data.  While colored as though they were links, they were not.

Specifically, with an official source.

3 comments:

  1. This book will get you part of the way there:

    https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810830332/Population-History-of-Western-U.S.-Cities-and-Towns-1850-1990

    I bought a copy last year and have been using it on a population-tracking project I have been working on, and that should eventually result in an interactive map web page.

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  2. ChatGPT has been called a pathological liar in a box. Large Language Models can construct sentences that scan as sentences. Large Language Models have no model of True v False

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  3. It should be. The Census Bureau and its foreign counterparts publish vast amounts of abstruse tabular data in complicated formats, but they can't be bothered with publishing basic data in in simple formats.

    However, one can extract that data (up through 2010) from the Statistical Abstract. Here it is (tab delimited):

    Year Resident population Increase over preceding census Area (sq mi)

    Number per Number Percent Total Land Water
    sq mi

    1790 3,929,214 4.5 X X 891,364 864,746 24,065
    1800 5,308,483 6.1 1,379,269 35.1 891,364 864,746 24,065
    1810 7,239,881 4.3 1,931,398 36.4 1,722,685 1,681,828 34,175
    1820 9,638,453 5.5 2,398,572 33.1 1,792,552 1,749,462 38,544
    1830 12,866,020 7.4 3,227,567 33.5 1,792,552 1,749,462 38,544
    1840 17,069,453 9.8 4,203,433 32.7 1,792,552 1,749,462 38,544
    1850 23,191,876 7.9 6,122,423 35.9 2,991,655 2,940,042 52,705
    1860 31,443,321 10.6 8,251,445 35.6 3,021,295 2,969,640 52,747
    1870 39,818,449 11.2 8,375,128 26.6 3,612,299 3,540,705 68,082
    1880 50,189,209 14.2 10,370,760 26.0 3,612,299 3,540,705 68,082
    1890 62,979,766 17.8 12,790,557 25.5 3,612,299 3,540,705 68,082
    1900 76,212,168 21.5 13,232,402 21.0 3,618,770 3,547,314 67,901
    1910 92,228,496 26.0 16,016,328 21.0 3,618,770 3,547,045 68,170
    1920 106,021,537 29.9 13,793,041 15.0 3,618,770 3,546,931 68,284
    1930 123,202,624 34.7 17,181,087 16.2 3,618,770 3,554,608 60,607
    1940 132,164,569 37.2 8,961,945 7.3 3,618,770 3,554,608 60,607
    1950 151,325,798 42.6 19,161,229 14.5 3,618,770 3,552,206 63,005
    1960 179,323,175 50.6 27,997,377 18.5 3,618,770 3,540,911 74,212
    1970 203,302,031 57.5 23,978,856 13.4 3,618,770 3,536,855 78,444
    1980 226,542,199 64.0 23,240,168 11.4 3,618,770 3,539,289 79,481
    1990 248,718,302 70.3 22,176,103 9.8 3,717,796 3,536,278 181,518
    2000 281,424,603 79.6 32,706,301 13.1 3,794,083 3,537,438 256,645
    2010 308,745,538 87.4 27,320,935 9.7 3,796,742 3,531,905 264,837

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