Introduction

One obstacle to assessing the direction of the American economy is the difficulty in getting a handle on how many people live in this country and how fast that number is growing.  It would seem to be a very elementary problem – surely the Census Bureau provides timely data on the size of the population, as well as births, deaths and net migration?  But it does not.  So far as I know, there is no official consistent measure of any of these numbers on a monthly, (or for that matter an annual basis), going back over the decades.  Moreover, the last time the Census provided a projection of the future path of these vital statistics was back in 2017.