[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]

A-a-a-and… we’re coming up to it… yes! Geronimo! 333, 333, 333. That is the population of the U.S.A at 27 seconds past 11:45 pm this evening, December 9th, 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Clock, which I have been watching.

That’s one-third of a billion—a milestone. Back in my monthly Diary for October 2016 I grumbled that the number three and its reciprocal one-third don’t get the respect they oughta. Sample quote:

The under-appreciation of three is best seen in the realm of fractions. It is possible to find a ruler marked off in thirds of an inch—I own one—but halves and quarters are far more popular. We say ”a quarter of an hour” all the time; when did you last hear someone say ”a third of an hour”?

Working from the numbers on the Population Clock back then, six years ago, I estimated that America’s population would cross the third-of-a-billion mark in January of 2020. That’s three years earlier than actuality, so plainly the Population Clock back then was anticipating a faster rate of increase than has actually occurred.

What accounts for this apparent slowdown? Falling fertility? Higher mortality? Lower immigration? Higher emigration? It must be some combination of the four, but I’ll leave the professional demographers to sort that out.

Pedants might quibble that 333,333,333 is not quite a third of a billion. A precise third of a billion would be 333,333,333 and a third. Given that—according to the Population Clock—our population currently has a net gain of one person every 129 seconds, I should actually have waited a further 43 seconds for the exact third of a billion.

Fair enough. The fun here, though, is in watching the numbers roll over, so that’s what I went with.

Long, long ago—I’m talking about the mid-1970s here—I watched with fascination and delight as the odometer on my first American automobile, my dear old 1964 Chevy Nova, rolled over the hundred thousand mile mark.

The U.S. population at that time, the mid-1970s, was around 220 million. That was the America I knew in my salad days, the America I fell in love with.

Our population has increased by fifty percent since then. It’s natural to ponder the question: Has that extra fifty percent made the USA a better country, a worse country, or what?

It’s natural to ponder that, but not very fruitful.

For one thing, as any real demographer will jump in to tell you, the size of a population is less important—from most points of view, certainly from the economic one—than its shape. What does the population pyramid look like? That’s the diagram that shows the population broken out by age categories.

The population pyramid for 1975 was a lot more pyramidish than the one for 2020: comparatively more young people, fewer old ones.

For another thing, your genial host here has himself moved up the population pyramid some since 1975. Back then I was a young buck, full of piss and vinegar, a willing customer for any kind of harmless excitement or cultural innovation. Now I’m a geezer—Hey, get off the lawn! Naturally I’m going to smile more fondly on the America of my youth.

All that being allowed for, though, I’m pretty sure something has been lost—something important to a person of nationalist temperament.

Sure, there was plenty of bickering and division back then. The elites of 1975 hated Richard Nixon just as much as the elites of 2022 hate Donald Trump. The race business was as salient then as now… although, I’d argue, less hypocritical. Our foreign policy was as FUBAR then as now: We left Saigon in 1975 as ignominiously as we left Kabul in 2021.

It’s my impression, though, that there was a kind of national solidarity back then that we have lost today. Is that a true impression, or just geezer talk? I don’t know.

The USA of the mid-1970s was a country that a healthy young white male from a different country couldn’t help but fall in love with. Is it still that way? I don’t know. You’ll have to find a healthy young white male alien and ask him.

What I said earlier needs some major qualification—there is a certain amount of bogosity about demography.

I’m talking about the numbers. I was working entirely from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Clock. How accurate is it? Not very, is my best guess.

If you bring up the Population Clock it gives you two headline numbers right at the top there. One is for the U.S.A., the other is the world population.

As I’m looking at it this evening the world population shows as seven billion 938 million and change. Whoa! Weren’t we told, and didn’t Radio Derb report, that world population would increase past the eight billion mark in the middle of November? Yes, we were. And didn’t subsequent news stories tell us that baby Vinice Mabansag, born 1:29 am November 15th in Manila, the Philippines, was the actual eight billionth person? Yes, they did.

The 8th Billionth #baby, “Vinice Mabansag”, was born in Tondo, Manila, #Philippines.https://t.co/RBCGojwtbt#population

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