The Great Growth Disconnect: Population Growth Does Not Equal Economic Growth

When we think of the growth of cities and metros, we often think in terms of population growth. But this growth bears little relation to economic growth, and it's a terribly misleading indicator of it.

As I wrote in my feature on economic recovery for The Atlantic, while many people use population as a way to gauge regional growth or decline, it actually tells us little about economic growth. To shed light on the connection — or, really, lack of one — between population growth and economic growth, my team and I tracked not just the recovery period but also for the entire decade of the 2000s.