3 big ways that the US will change over the next decade

Dudley Poston, a sociologist and demographer at Texas A&M University, on the changes American society will undergo over the next ten years.

1. Population growth: Ten years from now, the U.S. population will have almost 350 million people. China and India will still be bigger, but India with 1.5 billion people will now be larger than China, with 1.46 billion.

2. Population will get older: The U.S. is getting older and it’s going to keep getting older.
Today, there are over 74.1 million people under age 18 in the U.S. country. There are 56.4 million people age 65 and older. Ten years from now, there will almost be as many old folks as there are young ones. The numbers of young people will have grown just a little to 76.3 million, but the numbers of old people will have increased a lot – to 74.1 million. A lot of these new elderly will be baby boomers.

3. Racial proportions will shift: What will the country look like racially in 2030? Whites will have dropped to 55.8% of the population, and Hispanics will have grown to 21.1%. The percentage of black and Asian Americans will also grow significantly. So between now and 2030, whites as a proportion of the population will get smaller, and the minority race groups will all keep getting bigger. Eventually, whites will become a minority, dropping below 50% of the U.S. population in around the year of 2045.

Which scares a lot of whites.