CW 537 FBF - Exploring Demographic Shifts in Texas and the United States with Steve H. Murdock Former U.S. Census Bureau Director

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It's my pleasure to welcome Steve Murdock to the show today. He is with the Hobby center at Rice University, coming to us from Texas and the somewhat booming state of Texas. Not completely, of course, but we'll talk about that. And we're going to talk about demographics. He's a demographer and author of several books and has some interesting things to say about population shifts. So I think you'll really enjoy this segment. Steve, welcome. How are you?

Well, I'm fine. How are you doing, sir?

Good, thanks. So what is going on with the major, major shifts in population around the country nowadays?

Well, I Think, you know, this is, of course, exciting times for demographers such as myself, because we've, we're getting now in increasing amounts the 2010 census data. And these data show some very interesting patterns. One is, frankly, is that this has been the second slowest growing period in the the history of the Census. Only the 1930s had slower in terms of percentage population growth. But at the same time, we added 27.3 million people to the American population. We added that primarily in the south and the west, with over 85% of the growth being in the south and the West.

And Steve, when you say we added, you're talking about within the last 10 years, since the priority.

Within the last 10 years. I'm sorry, looking at that period of time, and you can see whether you look in percentage terms or numerical terms, those increases, you know where they are. For example, if you take the 10 largest states in terms of numerical population increase from 2000, 2010, they were, and I'll just read a list here. Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Virginia, Washington, Colorado and Nevada. So they're all in the west and South. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't significant populations, certainly in New York and other places. Simply says that we've seen this shift in population from the Northeast and Midwest to the south and the West. Basically a shift from the beginning of the 20th century, where 62% of the people lived in the northeastern Midwest and 38% lived in the south and West, to as of 2010, 40% live in the Northeast and the Midwest and 60% lived in the south and West. So one has been this overtime shift from the Northeast and Midwest to the south and the West. So that's been a major pattern. And we see it, you know, phenomenal growth, not just to dwell on Texas, but, you know, Texas added 4.3 million people to its population, a full 900,000 greater than California, which is a state that's 12 million larger.

So let me, let me ask you a question about that. The shift from the Northeast, I mean, is that pretty much as Billy Joel told us, they're closing all the factories down in Allentown? I mean, is it just the shift from for better or worse, and sometimes for worse, in many ways, America shifting its manufacturing base overseas or what? What do you attribute that to?

Well, I'm not an economist, but I think the shifts certainly.

Show very clearly what we're seeing in terms of shifts of industries to the south and to the West. I think some of it has to do as well with the composition of the populations in the south and west versus Northeast and Midwest, for example, one of the things that I tell people is that when you look at states across the country, you can basically say if you are not diverse, you are not growing. So that when you look at, for example, minority populations in America and you look at that composition, what you'll see is that the vast majority of African Americans, of Asians, of Hispanics are in the southern and western states. And you can take some of the Midwestern states, very, very slow population growth. An example of that would be a place like Iowa that has had relatively slow population growth. But the Great Plains of the United States, certainly when we looked at the largest cities for examp, we were startled to see that Chicago lost 200,000 people. So it's a combination of factors. But certainly there's a strong economic factor, as we've seen more growth, as you say, in factories, but in all kinds of businesses in many southern locations. And that coupled with, I think, growth in the population segments that are the fastest growing segments of the US population.

Very, very interesting. So also I think another thing we might attribute it to is maybe the aging baby boomer. I can't tell you how many people I've spoken with or met or heard about that live in, say, Michigan. Now, of course, economic factors are driving people out of Michigan for sure, but once they retire, they're thinking like, forget this cold weather. I'm going to move to Texas or maybe Florida or a Southern state where it's a much more pleasant place to live in terms of weather.

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Yeah, I think we've seen some of that. Certainly we've seen some of that in the various states you talked about, the Arizonas, the Texas, the Floridas and other states, particularly in the Southwest. So there's been certainly some falling of that. I think that the largest phenomena had been economic. I don't think there's any doubt about that. But certainly the aging of the population has had a couple of effects. And one is that in general, when we talk about the Northeast and Midwest, they are older populations than they are in the south and West. And you see a very marked difference. Let me just give you a Texas example. I was asked by a reporter when our data for Texas were first coming out to kind of give a modal Texan. I said, well, I can't do that. I said, because.

The majority of Texans now are minority group members, although non Hispanic whites are still the largest single proportion. I said let's look at two, let's look at a kind of a modal non Hispanic white and that turned out to be a woman 40 to 44 years of age. And the modal non Anglo or non Hispanic white, the mobile minority group member was an Hispanic male, 25 to 29. So that's a, you know, that's a 10 year over 10 year difference and that's a, that's a major different difference demographically. So, you know, you're seeing a combination, a mixture of age, race, ethnicity.

Economic and other factors all playing roles as we kind of shift our population around from one area to another.

One of the things you mentioned earlier in the talk here was that this is the slowest growth since really the Great Depression in terms of our population.

In terms of percentages.

Yeah, in terms of percentages. So now is that because the immigration, especially from the south, from Mexico has really slacked off for those anti immigration people. This is maybe one benefit of a bad economy. I mean, they're not coming over as much as they used to because governments aren't flushing with cash to give out for entitlement type programs. And there aren't the jobs here either. Right.

Well, I think more of it frankly was just the general economic slowdown of the latter part of the decade because the growth was going pretty well until that period of time. And then we saw a slowdown. I think sometimes people misunderstand that when you look at we don't have the final 2010 data on this, but when you look through 2009, basically two of every three new Americans that we had or added through birth. And so immigration is about 35% of our population growth and that's both legal and undocumented immigration. Undocumented. Now I think Pew Hispanic center and Homeland Security both have about the same number, somewhere around 10.8 to 11 million nationwide. So that's a force, but I think a good deal of it. We have, for example, the lowest immigration right now that we've had in numerous decades. We've got the lowest birth rate we've had for long periods of time. And that's across racial and ethnic groups, across states, across areas. And so there's been a kind of, I think people taking stock of where the economy is and saying wait a minute, I probably going to stay where I am for right now and I'm going to have to watch my resources.

Investments a great deal more carefully than I've had to sometimes in the past.

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We look at the ethnic component of populations. If we look at the US and then we look at Europe and I mean, Europe is dying, isn't it? And Russia is just evaporating. I mean, there's just not the fertility rates of the past. Right, right.

Well, one of the things that you. Is if you take Europe as a whole, Europe is the slowest growing region of the world. It is the oldest in terms of. I mean, there are some exceptions. Japan, for example, is a very old country. But in general, if you look for the oldest places, you look for the places with the lowest fertility there in Europe. And one of the things that I tell people is when you look at our population and look at the various racial and ethnic groups, one group, the non Hispanic white population, takes its heritage primarily to Europe. And so it's not likely that we're going to have a lot of European immigration simply because the numbers are small and the age structure is old. One of the big differences, and not the only one, but one of the big differences between our population and the European population is the degree to which we have very large minority populations that are younger, particularly in the case of Hispanics, generally have higher fertility rates. And our growth is increasingly dependent on minority populations. For example, in this decade, we've just gone through basically 71% of our increase. Seven of every ten new Americans were minority group members. You know, Hispanic, African American, Asian, American Indian, et cetera. And when you look at the growth, the growth of the non Hispanic white population, for example, it grew by only 4% from 2000, 2010. Hispanics grew by 30%, Asians grew by 47%, et cetera. So our growth and the difference between US and Europe in many ways is increasingly due to our minority populations.

Well, a couple things on that, Steve. Number one, what you mentioned to me is that a change in that. Now we're talking about the US And I just want to ask you about Europe in a moment. But a change in that in the US Is very unlikely because the average. What did you say before? You told me before when we were chatting, the average white female is what, 41 years old now or something?

Yeah, I think the average Anglo female is right around 40, 41 years of age. And when you begin to look at that non Hispanic white population, here's the kind of things that really mitigate it against coming back to some kind of rapid growth. First of all, fertility for non Hispanic whites has been below replacement for a couple of decades now. Their age structure now is getting to be. So it would be difficult to reverse that in any kind of biological sense in terms of immigration to replenish that population. The primary source of that would be Europe. Europe has one of the oldest populations in the world. It is a population that is not. Is at even lower fertility in many, many areas than the non Hispanic white population in the United States. And hence it's not going to be a likely source of immigration. So if you do away with high natural increase because your population is older and your birth rates are low and you're not likely to get immigration, well, then you have a component that's likely to decline as a proportion of the population. And we saw almost a 10% shift in the proportion of the US population that was non Hispanic white.

That's interesting. So a lot of our listeners here are landlords and certainly everybody plays a part in the economy in terms of having a job, selling a product, selling a service. If it wasn't for that immigration, America would really have its economy shrink, wouldn't it? I mean, we're really. We need that immigration or we need to start having a lot more kids over here, right?

Well, yeah. I mean, if you, you know, if you would have looked at, you know, our approximately change of 20 millions that we talked about in terms of our, of our total, our total population, you know, when you look at that, at that 27 million that we've talked about, when you look at it in terms of who contributed what, what you see very quickly is that, you know, the non Hispanic of the 27.3 million that we added, non Hispanic white accounted for 8.3%, 55% of that growth Hispanic increase. The Hispanic amount of growth was 15.2 million. So 2.3 for non Hispanic whites, 15.2 for Hispanics, 3.7 million increase for African Americans, 5.3 million for Asians, and then another 800,000 from a variety of groups. But it's really quite startling when you say that the Hispanic, the African American and the Asian populations all contributed a larger absolute number of persons to our population growth than did non Hispanic whites in this last decade.

Have the numbers ever. I mean, this is really an amazing time to study demographics, isn't it? I mean, the numbers have never been like this, have they?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm sure there's, I don't know all the periods of time, but certainly in my demographic career, last 35 years or so, they haven't been, you know, and we've had this prec. Something we talked about that shift was in the young population. But we shifted our population by about a decline of about 6% in this non Hispanic white population as a proportion of the total population. And when you looked under, you know, when you looked at under 18, then you had this 10% shift. You know, the under 18 population in the United States is only 54% non Hispanic white now. And so when you go and when you look at that population kind of, you know, with the kids being the future.

What you saw in that population in the United States from 2000 to 2010 is the number of non Hispanic white kids decreased, decreased by 4.3 million. The number of Hispanic kids by 7.5 million. African American kids decreased. Also about 244,000 Asians increased by about 1.7 million. So it's increasingly, in other words, that our child population, clearly without Hispanic population growth, would have had an absolute numerical decline.

People talk about the graying of America. That certainly is a phenomenon. But, but when you look at the graying of Europe, I mean, that's nothing compared to the U.S. i mean, Europe is on the road to extinction, isn't it?

Well, they're certainly an old population and they're going to have to either change some fertility patterns very quickly or they're going to have to allow for some form of immigration.

But when you speak of immigration in Europe, Europe has done that. I mean, there's a lot of Middle Eastern and African, northern African immigration through Europe, and that's changing a lot of things over there. But what were you going to say about that?

All I was going to say is that in many ways, I think one of the things that it's important for us to realize in the US Is that if you took the minority population out of America, the population of non Hispanic whites in America would not look terribly different. It would be younger, but it would still be not all that dissimilar from the European population. The difference between us and Europe is increasingly due to our.

Minority populations. And in a very real sense, I think we could say we have kind of two population groups in the United States. We have an older aging, literally dying off the end of the age chart, so to speak, Anglo population, which is pretty fixed in numbers and aging quite rapidly. And then we have a young, very diverse minority population that will increasingly be the future of the country and certainly of states like Texas and California and others. I mean, California's numbers were, to me, were just, were just startling. It was the only state in the country that had a larger Hispanic population increase than Texas did. And it Gained somewhere around, I think, 3.1 million Hispanics. But what was, what was very telling to me was that in terms of Texas population growth, it had about, well, had the second largest increase in the country, 464,000 increase in the number of non Hispanic whites. Okay. California had a NET decline of 860,000 non Hispanic whites.

Where are they going?

Well, all over.

They're going to Texas. I know that Texas, Arizona seemed to be the decline.

One of the things that people aren't as aware of, I think, as they might be, is that for a large number of years, I don't know exactly off the top of my head what the number, but for a large number of years, if you looked at domestic migration, meaning migration within the United States, that component of California's migration has been negative for a large number of years. They've made up for it in terms of population growth by a good deal of immigration and fairly high natural increase rates. But in terms of interchanges with other states, domestic migration, they've been losing more people than they've been gaining now for at least a decade.

Very interesting time. Let's talk a little bit about aid segmentation a little more if we can drill down on some of that a little bit. Because I think what's really interesting, and we were talking about this off the air, but I live here in Orange County, California, and first of all, I think real estate drives almost everything else in life because it's such a large portion of people's expenses, their housing expense and then also their cost of doing business and the prices they pay at businesses. If you go to a restaurant in Newport Beach, California, they have to charge a lot more for the food than they do in Phoenix, Arizona, because of the cost of the real estate and everything else that's integrated in there. And so when an area gets expensive, I say the population starts to age. But there are some exceptions to that which are kind of interesting to me. And we talked about that, but kind of speak on that if you would, a little bit.

Well, I think part of what we have had is that due to a variety of historical, discriminatory and other reasons, there are vast differences in the socioeconomic characteristics of different segments of our population. Just to give you an example, I was looking at some national data today, and if you look at 2009 data, which is the most recent we have on this from the census, at least the average non Hispanic white in America was making almost 60,000. The average Hispanic was making about 35.6 thousand. The average African American about 35.4 thousand. The average Asian about 63.7 thousand. So that there's very large differences. And so partly what happens with that difference in real estate is that you sort people other ways as well. And so. But in addition to that, you have underlying that pretty vast differences and differences that we certainly need to address as a country through education and other factors if we want to maintain our competitiveness. But those are very substantial differences and not differences that haven't. I mean, they're differences that have been there for a while.

And so people are self selecting, right?

Well, self selecting in a sense that. To some extent. Yeah. In other words. Or another way to say it is, people probably go where they can afford to go, right?

Sure.

Now, you'll find, of course, the support structure, the people doing lots of the work in those restaurants you talked about won't be living in the.

Yeah, of course they will.

Condos on the beach. But they'll be there because there's jobs there. So we have kind of that dual labor market that we.

That dual culture.

Yeah, dual culture. They've been there. But I think that you're right in the sense that I think when you, for example, when you look at retirement areas, I think you've seen some in the south, at least initially growing because they were cheaper places to retire than there were in some other parts of the country. And so people who were more middle class couldn't look at retiring in some place in the south or Southwest and more likely to be able to do it and afford it for the rest of their lives than was true in some of the places on the two coasts. So I think people have certainly. I mean, one of the major, major determinants of migration is incoming economics.

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What is the trend in America in terms of living style? I mean, like, to talk about household makeup and household Formation. But that really actually wasn't this question, this question. I wanted to talk about suburbia and urban areas and what are people doing now? I mean, certainly suburbia really became a factor after World War II, I guess, and Levittown and all that famous sort of suburbanization. Is that still the trend?

Absolutely. One of the things that you probably saw in the last couple weeks was a press release. I think it came out of Brookings, where they analyzed the census data and showed that the major cities of America, many of the large cities, had relatively slow population growth. We talked about Chicago only gaining about, I mean, losing population in absolute terms. But when you look at the growth, remember that the overall population in the United States grew by about 9.7%. So if we look at that relative to the, you know, the cities of America, New York grew by 2.1%, LA by 2.6%. Chicago went down. Houston grew by 7.5%, Philadelphia by 0.6, Phoenix by 9.4. The only one of the top 10 that grew by a larger percentage than that, 9.7, was San Antonio at 16%. But.

What you've got in many of these places is very dramatic increases and very, in some cases very multi ethnic increases in suburban areas. There's a county, for example, right outside of Houston, that Fort Bend county, that one of the interesting things is if you look at their growth, they had 40, 50,000 people each from the non Hispanic white, the Hispanic, the Asian and the African American groups. So a very diverse and very multi ethnic growth and diversification so continue in Fort Bend County. And this is a area right west of a county, right west of Harris county where Houston's located. And so what you're seeing is that suburban areas are still growing more rapidly than are the large old central cities.

There's some argument, you know, a lot of people argue against suburbia because it uses a lot of gasoline. You have to drive places, people are in their cars. And there's one person that I follow, I haven't had him on the show or anything before, but you know, he's an author and he, he's got a show that he does and he's really saying that suburbia is in danger because of oil prices. But it doesn't appear to be the case so far.

I don't know what that might be in the long run, but I think the differences are really a number. One of those is, of course, as you talked about the cost of land and the cost of real estate, if you look at what you can afford in a suburban area versus what you can in downtown LA or downtown New York or downtown perhaps Houston, you're going to be able to get more for less in most suburban areas. And I think certainly transportation costs as they go up will affect that. But you know, those differences have been the difference between housing costs in central cities versus suburbs have been a big factor for a number of decades and at least through 2010 continue to be.

So very good point. And you know what I think is driving a lot of that is that this gentleman, it's James Kunstler, by the way, who I'm talking about, and his argument is that fuel prices will make suburbia expensive. But I would argue that fuel prices impact the construction cost of urban properties much more significantly than they do driving to the grocery store in suburbia. Because when you build up, those construction costs just soar in high rise condos and so forth like that.

Well, yeah, I think the other part of that to the. And again, I don't, I'm not a construction person, but I think the other part of that is that if you look particularly at suburban households, we're talking a little bit about households, but suburban households are much more likely to be married couples with children than is true in large urban areas where you have lots of singles, you have older persons, et cetera. And I think what you see is not only the desire to spend less on housing, but also to have that housing that has a little land with it for your kids to play out in the backyard, et cetera, which isn't necessarily provided by an urban condo. And I live in one, so I'm not meaning to be critical.

Right. Yeah.

But I'm simply saying that I think there are factors that are pretty part and parcel of family life in America that favor suburban living. Obviously, you know, substantial increases in the cost of fuel and so forth might get people to rethink that. But I think it's economic plus other factors that are creating this growth.

The phenomena that happened that is yet another aspect of distribution is that we clearly seen many, many rural areas in the United States suffering this last decade, meaning continued population loss. So if you go through the Great Plains in the United States, really from the Canadian border down through the Texas panhandle, or you go over in the Midwest, see a number of states that have had lots of declining counties, so lots of rural areas have continued to decline, both as a result of natural decrease, that is, more people dying than being born, but also because of continued migration to suburban and metropolitan areas.

Right. And you know, speaking of suburbia, there's an old saying in real estate that people drive until they qualify.

You know, so they gotta drive as far as they can qualify, right?

Yes, yes. Well, I think, you know, we've been looking at some of the growth in.

In Texas counties, in the Hobby center here at Rice, and one of the things that is clear is that the suburbanization has gone farther and farther out as that drive in terms paid for you to qualify, paid for you to drive in order to qualify. And so as you look at cities across the country, that has been a pattern. And again, yes, massive changes in oil prices and so forth may impact that. But, you know, what we can say is, to date and through this decade, suburbanization still had a pretty good hold on America.

Let me ask you about household makeup for a moment and try and wrap up here. I heard that in the last few presidential elections, many people didn't really realize what the largest voting block was. A lot of times you hear the reports, they try to divide up the voting blocks by age or ethnicity, or they talk about the AARP or trade groups or unions or whatever. But actually, what I had read a couple of places and also heard is that the largest voting bloc in the last few presidential elections was singles, because people are waiting so long or divorcing or whatever. And nobody really sort of viewed that as a voting bloc or a constituency the same way they viewed these other groups.

Well, we've got a number of things, of course, going on. We have the oldest at first marriage since the 1930s. And so many, many young adults remain single until the latter part of their 20s. And this is a new phenomena. We have fairly high divorce rates. We have also people who are living longer. But because of the differential that exists between males and females, which is still there, women live longer than men. And so longevity still, although men have done better the last decade or so than they did two or three decades ago, we're still seeing a growing number of widows out there who outlive men. So we have a number of factors that are going together to decrease household size and to diversify the form of households that we have out there. We have more single parents. We have more diverse household compositions than any time, at least in recent history. So households have become very important patterns, not only politically, but certainly for the private sector. In terms of marketing, all you have to do is watch television and see the number of things where convenience is the. A major factor being stressed in terms of the food product that's being provided. Get something quick and get something that is appropriate for someone who is A single person, they certainly have impacted lots of things as well.

One of the things that I was talking to my mother about this just yesterday actually is I recently purchased a small apartment complex in Scottsdale, Arizona, and she asked me what the unit mix was she being in real estate as well. And she said, you know, what's the mix of units? And I said, they're all one bedrooms. And she said, well, I don't know if that's so good because you'll get that transient tenant. And I said that was true 20, 25 years ago. But nowadays the one bedrooms actually do, or I mean can do all other things being equal quite well. And that's why Ike was kind of leading that into my question on the singles as being such a large demographic cohort. So it's, it's really different than it used to be, though. I mean, one bedrooms used to be a bunch of like transients that wouldn't stay in your property very long and you couldn't find a renter for a one bedroom. But that's really changed nowadays, hasn't it?

Yeah, well, composition certainly household size has gone down. And as I said, the diversity of household forms, you know, the married couple with two children, one male, one female, the male preferably two years older than the female, which is kind of the stereotypical 1950s or 60s, probably 60 or 70's now, because we used to think of three or four children, those are increasingly a decreasing proportion of the total. And so we have just a variety of household groups out there that, as you say, are driving a variety of housing choices. And so that's certainly a factor that I think is critical. I think, I think overlying this, although I'm not an economist, I think is to see where we're going economically in terms of our recovery. Those sorts of things are going to affect not only economic, but they're going to affect demographic factors going forward.

Yeah, no question about it. Well, I know we need to wrap up here and let you go, but I want to just ask you one more thing and talk about Gen Y for a moment. Gen Y is such a large demographic cohort and they are moving into their prime household formation years and their prime renting years. And in terms of the housing market, I guess the one thing about Gen Y that doesn't bode well for landlords and real estate investors is, is that they like their parents and they tend to stay living there a long time.

Well, yeah, you know, I sometimes kiddingly say in my presentations that we're looking at the baby boom Generation. And we're looking at the numbers that will be. And, and, you know, these, this number will be, hopefully they will be, you know, elderly people without children, meaning without children living with them.

Right.

But, you know, I think we're yet really. No, and I'm not an expert in this area, so there may be people who do know, but I think to see how these household forms will play out, because there is deep rooted, I think, in American culture and American society the idea of bonding together of pairs.

Which leads to offspring, or at least can. And so it'll be interesting to see if we really do get generations where intentionally end up with what appears to be possible, very large proportions of persons who never have any children. That would be quite different than anything in the history of the US and quite different, I think, than we see ourselves socially and culturally. I think it's, you know, there's certainly lots of economics that would support that as not being an illogical set of circumstances. You know, you talked about real estate. Again, I'm not a real estate expert, but a friend of mine who does a lot of work in this area, and I don't know whether he's right or not, but he said he believes there are segments now of American society in which people are beginning to look at housing more like they look at automobiles as something that you purchased, you used, sold it. When you sold it, you got as much out of it as you could, but you didn't see it as much of an investment as maybe your parents did. And if that shifts, that would be a major shift in the way that all of us have, have looked at real estate and certainly the bubble that we've had and in fact, that continues to be bothersome to our economy. If we start looking at housing in the way that he's suggesting, it would be a very different real estate market and real estate reality, if you will.

I think for many reasons we are going to see the homeownership rate continue to decline pretty dramatically. And that is why the apartment developers are really, really looking at an incredible slew of demographic good news for them as the renter market increases. And I think you're right. I think we're going to see many, many millions of new renters enter the market. Many reasons Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac possibly going away. So financing being even tougher to get than it is now. People that have destroyed their credit the last few years and letting their houses go, they're going to be renting and then Gen Y moving into their prime renting years and Staying single longer. You know, if you're married, you're more likely to buy and own. If you're single, you're more likely to rent. And that's just my anecdotal interpretation.

There's better people than me, at least, to talk about this. But I think. I do think that we've got patterns and trends that may be. You know, we may have had a period here because of the economics of it, too. That will. That will substantially change our view on housing and our view on housing composition going forward. I think it's just I was. I'm one of those people who owns a house in another city that he doesn't live in.

I own many of those.

And, you know, I can say that my grandson says, well, why did you do that? You know, why didn't you just rent? And, you know, my explanation seems to him kind of quaint. You know, it used to be a good idea to buy. And he kind of looks at me like, goodness, how old an idea is that? Not realizing it's not all that old? You know, five or six years ago, you'd have been being told that still, I think. And so it could be.

A substantial shift going forward. But that's what makes demographics so exciting. And when we look at, in a place here like Texas at Rice University center, one of the things that we find exciting is seeing how it changes out. How it changes by geography, how it changes by area, how it changes for population groups. And one of the things that we spend a lot of time looking at is the need to ensure through education, other factors that these rapidly growing components of our population are competitive as we go forward in time. Because in a very real sense, as we look at America today, the future of America, the future of states like Texas and California is increasingly tied to their minority populations. And in a very real sense, how well they do is how well the US Is going to do in the future.

Yeah, very good points. Well, Steve Murdoch, thank you so much. Give out your website, if you would, and tell us a little bit about your books, too.

Okay, well, our website, you just go HTTP hobbycenterice.edu and you can get the data not only for Texas, but for the US on our website, learn about our center, which is looking at issues not only for Texas, but across the country. We will be. With some support from the Meadows foundation, we are redoing two works that have been, we think, consequential both nationally and in the state of Texas. One of those is the America Challenged, which is a work that looks at the demographic implications of the socioeconomic implications. Really a demographic change and similar one that has done that for Texas. Both of them looking, for example, at what does it mean for education for the state and Texas, case in the country, what does it mean to have the changing racial and ethnic composition? What does it mean to have the changing age composition that we have as we go forward in time, really? What does it mean, for example, that our population is going to have one in five Americans that's 65 years of age or older by about 20, 30? What does that mean not only in Social Security, those kind of issues that we've heard a lot about. What's it mean in terms of markets? What's it mean in terms of tax revenues? What's it mean in terms of consumer expenditures across the country and in states like Texas?

Excellent. Very good points. Well, Steve Murdoch, Rice University thank you so much for your insights today. Really appreciate hearing about this.

Well, thank you. Appreciate it. Enjoyed talking.

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