Growth Without Newcomers

What this ranking does not measure

This is not a birth rate and not a measure of how well a state is doing. It is births minus deaths, so an older population pushes a state down regardless of how many children are born there, and a young population pushes it up regardless of anything else - Utah's top rank and Maine's near-bottom rank are substantially an age-structure difference, not a verdict on either place. It also does not measure whether a state is growing: Florida is at -4.10 per 1,000 natural yet gained 1,770,504 people over the same four years, while West Virginia had positive net migration (+10.54 per 1,000) and still shrank overall. A negative score does not mean people are leaving; it means more residents died than were born. The figure is a four-year cumulative total divided by the population at the end of that period, not an annual rate, so it cannot be compared to a published annual crude rate of natural increase, and the denominator understates the mid-period population most in the fastest-growing states. It says nothing about income, jobs, health, cost of living, or why any of these numbers look the way they do, and with n=51 no relationship to any other field in this file should be read as cause.