US Population Growth Rate Calculator

The R Datasets package provides US population data for every 10 years from 1790 until 1970.

• What does a simple plot of this data look like?
• What is the general trend of the growth rate (increasing faster or slower)?
• What is the annualized growth rate between any 2 years?

• Create a shiny app with:
  • Selection widgets to choose the start and end year to analyze
  • A simple plot of the US population data for the chosen year range, with selection for logarithmic Y axis
  • A computation of the annualized growth rate for the chosen year range

• The annualized growth rate is computed with the following formula:

((endPop - startPop) ^ (1/numYears)) - 1

• The value for the years 1790-1970 is computed here as an example:

((203.20 - 3.93) ^ (1/(1970-1790))) - 1

[1] 0.02985167

• The US population trend has always been increasing
• Looking at the logarithmic graph, the trend has slowed down over time

• Selecting different date ranges, the growth rate is smaller for the later years than the earlier years.

• Conclusion: while the population trend is upward, the rate of growth has diminished from around 3% per year before 1850 to under 2% per year after 1850.