Almost a decade after it was reviewed in Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology magazine, we take a look back at Joel Kotkin’s “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050,” and his insights on the nation’s diversity surge, workforce and environmental challenges, upward mobility, and technology.
One of the core influences on the America of 2050 will be Hispanic population growth, said Kotkin in his critically-acclaimed book. Kotkin’s optimistic outlook for America’s future reflects the great breadth of innovation that can occur when a diverse array of insights and perspectives become a part of our technology enterprise.
As Joel Kotkin points out in The Next Hundred Million, published by The Penguin Press, America in 2050 will be wholly different than the country we know today.
“The America of 2050 may not stride the world like a hegemonic giant, but it will evolve into the one truly transcendent superpower in terms of society, technology and culture,” he writes.
And despite the props given to regions around the world, such as Asia, where economic growth is robust in China and India, Kotkin contends that it is America that will be a region thriving in (three) decades–largely because of the nation’s burgeoning and unique confluence of ethnic diversity.
An urban scholar who teaches at Chapman University in Orange, CA, Kotkin explores in his book how America will evolve as it passes the 400 million mark by 2050 and why the nation will be better for it.
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the Hispanic population in the United States is expected to reach about 30 percent of the populace– 132.8 million people. Contrast that to 22.4 million Hispanics counted during the 1990 Census and 48.4 million as of July 1, 2009–already the nation’s largest ethnic or racial minority.
“By mid-century the United States will be a predominantly ‘white country’ no longer but rather a staggering amalgam of racial, ethnic and religious groups, all participants in the new civilization whose roots lie not in any one country or continent but across the entirety of human cultures and racial types,” Kotkin writes.
Kotkin argues that because of immigration and spiraling birth rates among America’s ethnic minorities, this country will surge past nations in an aging Europe and Asia in vitality, opportunity and change, asserting that no other advanced nation in the world will have such diversity. For him, these fluxes in the population will lead to an economic upswing, since population growth leads to an increased capacity to create wealth, which in turn raises the standards of living.
Countries with an aging and relatively homogeneous population may very well find themselves crushed by large-scale pension obligations, without younger workers to help alleviate the cost. Truly, the effect of this explosive diversity dramatically will reshape and guide how people live and interact, Kotkin writes.
Big urban towns like New York and Chicago no longer will be primary enclaves for diversity, but diversity will show itself throughout America, particularly in its counties and suburbs. Indeed, that is already occurring.
Rural Shelby County, AL, covering about 800 square miles in the center of the state, offers a penetrating illustration. A recent Census report showed that the growth among the Hispanic population in Shelby County increased by more than 300 percent from 2,910 to 11,567 over the decade since 1990.
In Alabama statewide the Hispanic population increased 145 percent, according the Census figures. It is this kind of staggering change in population demographics that will be captured all across America, according to Kotkin, who describes the suburban and outlying communities of the future as “preindustrial villages” that will be more compact and self sufficient.
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