Rural Georgia’s current demographic implosion didn’t happen overnight, or in a vacuum. Look behind headlines about the stunning number of counties reporting more deaths than births, and you’ll find an earlier economic signal that something was amiss: a breathtaking drop in per capita income (PCI) performance that began roughly a decade before rural Georgia hit its demographic tipping point.
The downturn in the state’s PCI performance was all the more startling because it followed at least 20 years of remarkable improvement. Between 1980 and 2000, Georgia’s average per capita income climbed from 84.5% of the national average to 95.1%, and it rose in rank among the 50 states from 38th to 25th. Only New Hampshire climbed further during that period.
But the dawn of the new millennium brought a downturn at least as remarkable as the earlier progress. There were, to be sure, external forces at work: the 9/11 attacks stalled the entire nation’s economy, and the dot-com bubble hit high-tech centers, including the Atlanta metro area, particularly hard. But neither those factors nor any other obvious forces explain the collapse of Georgia’s PCI performance…