AMERICAN PIE CHART

Tales from the United States Census Bureau, from Great Expectations to Hard Times

Frequent visitors to these pages, podcasts and interviews are only too aware of my unrepentant addiction to great stories. 

One regular, reliable and affordable (no charge) 'connection' currently feeding my habit are those 342,034,432 individuals (as of mid-2025) who comprise the population of the USA. 

Not as depicted by the Press and Podcast community, or rampant Social Media wildfires, but by that admirable collector and curator of the nation's vital statistics the United States Census Bureau.

The Bureau pieces together an immensely thorough, fascinating and constantly evolving portrayal of America which can be of no little interest to anyone involved in diverse strands of The Business of Pleasure, ranging from cinema, where the U.S. and Canada combined is still generally the biggest international market (although interestingly China has overtaken North America in some years) to sectors dependant on tourism into the UK (including West End theatre, attractions and hospitality) where the USA is the largest single national source market, and Live Music, where the USA is estimated to have grossed $15.6 billion in 2025.

With at least one daily post, the Census Bureau’s offering can be a bit of a mixed bag. 

Yesterday, for example, the 25^th of September, the Bureau posted the 2023 Business Dynamics Statistics, an annual release which began in 1978 where you can find such invaluable BI gems as:

Analysis of Start-Up Businesses by State,

and

Analysis of Job Creation by Industry.

But it is often the quirkier posts that catch the eye, such as:

17^th September:  ‘The U.S, Centenarian Population Grew by 50% between 2010 and 2020.’

And what’s more, the ‘boys’ are catching up:

‘In 2020, centenarians were overwhelmingly female at 78.8%. This was a slight decline from 2010, when centenarians were 82.8% female. Between 2010 and 2020, the male centenarian population grew by 85.3% versus a 42.9% increase for female centenarians.

And…

24^th September: ‘Almost a Quarter of Married Couples Didn’t Have Joint Accounts in 2023, Up From 15% in 1996

But then, every couple of weeks, the Bureau will hit you with a statistic that really gets you thinking, such as:

9^th September: ‘Income Gap Between Householders With College Degrees and Those With High School Degrees but No College Widened Over Last Two Decades. …For example, the median income of households headed by someone with a bachelor’s degree or higher was $132,700, more than double the $58,410 median income of those with householders with a high school degree but no college in 2024.’

And…

23 September: ‘While Share of Younger Women Without Children Increased, More Women Had Children as They Entered Their Late 40s From 2014 to 2024,’ which details, among other things, how:

‘In 2014, about 75% of women aged 20 to 24 had not had children. By 2024, that figure had jumped to 85%...

'Among women aged 25 to 29, childlessness rose from about 50% to 63%.'

'Even women in their 30s and early 40s saw increases in childlessness: about 40% of women ages 30 to 34 were childless in 2024, up from about 29% in 2014.’*

And the main reason, as if you hadn’t guessed already: ‘It’s the economy, Stupid.’

About a month and a half ago, the Bureau posted some stats which kind of put the above into context. 

And which also, I believe, sheds some light on the kind of zero-sum thinking increasingly prevalent in both the Republican and Democratic parties at the moment, not to mention the rapidly polarising UK political landscape.**

5 August: ‘Significant Drop in Share of Young Adults Achieving Four Milestones: Moving Out of Parental Home, Marriage, Work and Having Kids.’  ‘Moving out of the parental home, getting a job, tying the knot and having kids used to be the most common pathway to adulthood, with almost half of 25- to 34-year-olds having experienced all four milestones in 1975.  Nearly 50 years later, less than a quarter of U.S. adults this age had done the same.’

Which, of course, isn’t a problem in and of itself.

But if you happen to be one of those young adults, and you’re struggling to carry the burden of expectations (whatever their origins or current relevance) in one of the most competitive societies the world’s ever seen, the impact can be both toxic and far-reaching, both personally and politically.

And, of course, psychologically***

‘...Different theoretical models have been proposed to explain how organisms cope with expectation violations. Typically, the experienced discrepancy between expectation and disconfirming evidence is referred to as ‘prediction error.’ A large body of research indicates that the degree to which expectation violations trigger compensatory organismic, cognitive, emotional and motivational responses scales proportionately to the magnitude of the prediction error.  In addition, it has been proposed that one of humans’ core motives is to reduce the probability of future expectation violations, as they often evoke aversive emotional states, enhance control demands and might threaten individuals’ self-concept. Previous research proposes that minimising future expectation violations can be achieved by adaptively adjusting expectations as a function of the prediction error, leading to updated versions of those expectations that integrate previous and current expectation-disconfirming information…

…Often, however, individuals do not update their expectations after these were violated by situational outcomes. Such expectation maintenance can be advantageous when the obtained outcomes could be disregarded as probable noise, when avoiding or attenuating negative affect after worse-than-expected experiences, or when expectations need to be robust because they relate to values and positive beliefs that individuals hold about themselves. Conversely, maintaining expectations despite disconfirming evidence can also have negative consequences for oneself or others.  For instance, rigid expectations have been identified as one of the core factors involved in the development and chronicity of mental orders.’

I thought of the 'Young Americans' in the Census Bureau post above as I sat behind two toothless and grizzled 60+ addicts on the bus yesterday.  And of a survey I recollected (but which ChatGPT couldn’t find) where people reaching the end of their lives were asked what their greatest regrets were. Somewhat unexpectedly (for me at least) at the top of the list was:  “I wish I hadn’t been so hard on myself.”

DT                                                                                                                                                            25 September 2025

*This may have contributed to the US Live Music receipts noted above. There used to be a much-quoted Music Industry aphorism that when women turned thirty, prams replaced gig tickets.

**BBC Radio 4 'Rethink' 26 September 

***Expectation Violations, Expectation Change, and Expectation Persistence: The Scientific Landscape as Revealed by Bibliometric Network Analysis José Garcia Alanis, Anna E. Strelow, Martina Dort, Hanna Christiansen, Martin Pinquart, Cristian Panitz. University of California Press, 2023