When we think of the growth of cities and metros, we often think in terms of population growth. But this growth bears little relation to economic growth, and it's a terribly misleading indicator of it.
As I wrote in my feature on economic recovery for The Atlantic, while many people use population as a way to gauge regional growth or decline, it actually tells us little about economic growth. To shed light on the connection — or, really, lack of one — between population growth and economic growth, my team and I tracked not just the recovery period but also for the entire decade of the 2000s.
Using figures from the U.S. Census and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, José Lobo of Arizona State University and my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute examined the trends in population growth and productivity growth (measured as economic output per capita) for all 350-plus U.S. metros over the decade spanning 2001 to 2011.
