About Myrdal
Myrdal is a demography and migration dataset, published as a site so the series can be read, charted and taken away. It is named for Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987), whose An American Dilemma (1944) made a national question answerable with evidence, and whose idea of cumulative causation held that advantage and disadvantage compound through a region's population rather than correcting themselves.
The thesis
Population structure is not a slow-moving backdrop to economics; it is one of its causes. Who can work and who must be supported is set by age structure decades before it shows up in a fiscal projection. Where people are is set by migration, which moves labour and demand between places simultaneously. How many there will be is set by fertility and mortality that responded to conditions a generation earlier. Myrdal assembles the measured series behind those three forces from named statistical sources, and keeps their seams visible, so the demography in an economic argument can be checked rather than assumed.
In scope
- Population levels and age structure, by country and by United States county
- The demographic transition — fertility, mortality, life expectancy
- Dependency ratios, youth and old-age
- Migration: international migrant stock and net migration; United States internal flows
- Nativity and the foreign-born share
- Long-run historical population, from year 1 of the common era
- Race and ethnicity counts as published by the Census Bureau, as population composition
Out of scope
- Income and wealth distribution — that is a sibling site's subject, not this one's
- Health outcomes and health systems beyond the mortality and life-expectancy measures that define the demographic transition
- Labour-market outcomes beyond the labour-force and unemployment counts that describe population composition
- Immigration policy and political commentary
- Population forecasting of our own. Where a publisher issues projections they are shown as that publisher's projections, kept apart from observations, and never extended by us
This boundary is written down, in full, in the site's focus specification, so drift can be audited rather than argued about. It is a draft awaiting the owner's ratification.
How to read the counts
62 series are registered and 62 are published — those two happen to be equal here, because nothing is withheld. They are still reported as two numbers, because on a sibling site they are not equal, and a count that silently merges the two teaches a reader the wrong thing. Of those, 60 have at least one data row and 56 can be charted. The differences are explained on Methodology, one series at a time.
An Arcanum Research project, built on the Anu Framework. Architect: nickanderson.us. Educational and research dataset; cite per CITATION.cff; terms in TERMS.md.