Whenever the new yearbooks come out, we all look at the figures and see the publisher increase never really matches up with the baptism figures. It never should match up as all newly baptized ones are already publishers, and may have been for many years. I, as an example, became an unbaptized publisher at age 11. I didn't get baptized until i was 17.
What i wanted to do was add up all the baptism figures for the u.s in the last 70 years and see what that number would come out to. The first problem i ran into was, i couldn't find the baptism figures in the yearbooks pre the 1970 yearbook. So i started there. I went ahead and added Alaska and Hawaii to the u.s. figures, Alaska stopped reporting separate from the u.s. in the 2008 yearbook, and Hawaii in 2012.
Yearboook #baptized
1970------------29,954
1971------------39,445
1972------------40,814
1973------------48,428
1974------------56,190
1975------------83,038
1976------------72,607
1977------------44,244
1978------------28,276
1979------------20,711
1980------------27,187
1981------------28,028
1982------------28,715
1983------------34,011
1984------------36,630
1985------------35,912
1986------------34,677
1987------------42,161
1988------------39,519
1989------------43,519
1990------------48,769
1991------------47,697
1992------------44,984
1993------------41,170
1994-------------42,054
1995------------39,502
1996----------44,317
1997-----------44,060
1998----------45,607
1999----------37,673
2000----------32,871
2001---------30,536
2002---------27,973
2003---------30,112
2004---------30,584
2005---------30,989
2006---------28,628
2007---------29,140
2008---------37,509
2009---------35,804
2010---------34,842
2011--------35,516
2012---------32,953
2013---------32,039
2014---------32,118
2015----------36,034
2016----------28,353
grand total-----1,794,385 (check my math, I probably made a calculation error)
so in the 1970 yearbook the u.s. had 343,673 avg publishers, again no idea how many are unbaptized versus baptized. 2016 avg publisher count is1,195,081. Without figuring in death rates you have well over 500,000 people missing. My next project is, how many foreign language publishers and cong. are there in the u.s.