"I have often argued that urban density is a problem for fertility."
Not to mention sanity. I fail to see an advantage to living in a mega-city. They no longer produce anything of use for the country as a whole. The economics consists of financial products and the service industry. If mega-cities disappeared overnight, the rest of the country would have little notice.
"Caplan then retorted that the very low fertility of urban cores is really due to high housing prices and if you could just build even more high-rise apartments, they would become cheap, and fertility would recover."
I reply that only an idiot would want to live in a place like that.
"Both areas are politically liberal, highly educated and have incomes well above the national average."
The term 'highly educated' is so nebulous. What is left unanswered is educated in what?
Furthermore, they have incomes well above the national average only because the cost of living is well above the national average, which means no advantage.
"A high rate of marriage was central to the Baby Boom but so was suburban living. Those two pillars together supported the rise in fertility in the US, as well as many other countries."
Excellent point.
Now, my reply to the rebuttal:
"Did developers wake up one day and just decide to build apartments that aren’t family friendly? No, they are responding to demand."
No, they are responding to more profit.
"Note that in terms of square feet, US homes are actually larger now than they were in the early 20th century, when fertility was higher."
Homes, yes; apartments, not at all. Many newer NYC apartments have been declining in size for many years.
"And it so happens that the sorts of people who are more affected (liberals, atheists, career women) prefer living in dense urban centres."
There you go again with the degradation of atheists. Why the hell would atheists prefer dense urban centers? And why would they shun children?
I think you are on to something. Seems the Fed’s have all sorts of plans—and money—to encourage higher birth rates, e.g., taxation. How about we try subsidizing apartments that are 3+ child “friendly”? Of course to live in such, would require 3+ children. Right now, the Fed’s and Locals encourage housing for the poor by strong arming section 8 apartments in new complexes. Why section 8 and not family friendly apartments? Of course, the Fed’s are horrible at such matters of encouragement, but perhaps the idea has some merit in an experimental basis.
Nevertheless, cities exist and are a fact of life. Government has tried to increase population and now reverts to immigration of third world replacements. Nihilism is never a solution, it is an end. Choose. My proposal is simply to learn if such incentives can work in the society as now exists.
"Nevertheless, cities exist and are a fact of life."
I have no problem with cities; mega-cities are a problem. Small—to medium-sized cities, such as those in the Midwest, are most desirable. To me, cities start to be undesirable above 600,000, but of course, there are other mitigating factors.
"Government has tried to increase population and now reverts to immigration of third world replacements."
I am not a fan of government; the smaller, the better. The government should protect the populace and not much more.
People in cities also often only live there temporarily, moving to the suburbs to have kids. So the low fertility of urban areas is not just inflated by the type of people who choose to live there, but also by “fertility drain” of urban residents
30% of children born in the US are 3rd children? This seems crazy to me. I suppose it makes sense when considering statistics about 45% of women being childless by 2030, but it does not align with my intuition.
I'm not buying the square footage argument. For most of human history people were living in single room abodes and still popping out babies left and right. Here in Hawaii multigenerational housing is normal often with each generations entire family living in a single room in a shared house (grandparents bedroom 1, adult child one and his spouse and kids bedroom 2, adult child 2 and family bedroom 3, cousin one and his family living room, cousin two and family garage) and the Filipino and Micronesian ghettos are still popping kids out kids left and right in those conditions.
I myself was raised in a two bedroom trailer with three opposite sex siblings and two sets of bunk beds until adulthood in the Midwest. I and my wife raised our two kids in a 300 sq ft studio and that was in modern times, my youngest left two years ago. My grandmother had fourteen kids in a four bedroom house.
There maybe a cultural stigma with it where people convince themselves they can't have kids because not enough room but that isn't the argument you are making, you are making one that square footage unto itself matters in a significant way and I'm like your Carl/Winegard in not buying it, neither history nor realty bare that out. I'll concede maybe at some level there is a direct correlation but it's well above fertility replacement level, i.e. there is probably a floor of around one kid per 100 sq ft but it's nowhere near 1 per 1000 sq ft as you are implying. And even that might be too high, I spent a lot of time as a homeless case manager for families and plenty of US homeless families were breeding just fine in tents, cars, and even while living for years in mass shared dorms of emergency shelters.
If people want kids, they'll have them. That's a culture problem, not a housing problem.
'Consider Sydney and Perth in Australia, where the TFR is a healthy 2.0 in the expensive but family-friendly suburbs but is an ultra-low 1.0 in the apartment-centric core.'
This is the problem with a lot (not all) articles concerned with fertility: failure to stratify, as though within-country populations are monolithic.
Central Sydney is *full* of homosexuals. Central Perth didn't use to be; maybe it is now. SW Sydney is packed with Muslims (again I don't know about south Perth). I'm not saying that housing density doesn't matter, but intra-population differences like these should be taken into account.
I find this fascinating, it's a subject that we should be seriously concerned about in the West, especially in Europe where land is far more densely populated.
There are serious problems in using population density as a measure of how many people are living in close proximity to each other. Take the UK as an example, population density is 208 per sq km. However much of Scotland, Wales and the North of England is empty moor land populated by a few farmers and some sheep.
The pop density of the South East of England is 492 per sq km while the pop density of London is 5854 per sq km. Are people in London, many of whom live in those high rise flats, provided by the state, having kids? The fertility rate is 1.39, even with a large proportion of first generation migrants and muslims living in London. The "cheap apartments" theory seems to be bunk.
Thank you for this great article. While neither side of the debate can assert to a scientific certainty whether density does or does not contribute to low population and birth rate, it's a problem well worth pondering. I learned a lot from this.
This is one of the more unconvincing articles I've read. Stilted by the libertarian rationalist moment we're currently in, but completely myopic and vacant.
The reason developers don’t build large apartments is obvious – small flats are more profitable on a per sq m basis. Childless couples have more money and need less space than families with children.
I would like to point out that any time somebody says, "you know a great example of this is Monaco"... You can probably through the argument in the trash. The dynamics of Monaco are like San Marino and Macau, just not a civilizational building model, and artificial economies dependent on the larger countries they orbit
"I have often argued that urban density is a problem for fertility."
Not to mention sanity. I fail to see an advantage to living in a mega-city. They no longer produce anything of use for the country as a whole. The economics consists of financial products and the service industry. If mega-cities disappeared overnight, the rest of the country would have little notice.
"Caplan then retorted that the very low fertility of urban cores is really due to high housing prices and if you could just build even more high-rise apartments, they would become cheap, and fertility would recover."
I reply that only an idiot would want to live in a place like that.
"Both areas are politically liberal, highly educated and have incomes well above the national average."
The term 'highly educated' is so nebulous. What is left unanswered is educated in what?
Furthermore, they have incomes well above the national average only because the cost of living is well above the national average, which means no advantage.
"A high rate of marriage was central to the Baby Boom but so was suburban living. Those two pillars together supported the rise in fertility in the US, as well as many other countries."
Excellent point.
Now, my reply to the rebuttal:
"Did developers wake up one day and just decide to build apartments that aren’t family friendly? No, they are responding to demand."
No, they are responding to more profit.
"Note that in terms of square feet, US homes are actually larger now than they were in the early 20th century, when fertility was higher."
Homes, yes; apartments, not at all. Many newer NYC apartments have been declining in size for many years.
"And it so happens that the sorts of people who are more affected (liberals, atheists, career women) prefer living in dense urban centres."
There you go again with the degradation of atheists. Why the hell would atheists prefer dense urban centers? And why would they shun children?
And, as always, quality over quantity.
I think you are on to something. Seems the Fed’s have all sorts of plans—and money—to encourage higher birth rates, e.g., taxation. How about we try subsidizing apartments that are 3+ child “friendly”? Of course to live in such, would require 3+ children. Right now, the Fed’s and Locals encourage housing for the poor by strong arming section 8 apartments in new complexes. Why section 8 and not family friendly apartments? Of course, the Fed’s are horrible at such matters of encouragement, but perhaps the idea has some merit in an experimental basis.
"I think you are on to something."
I am never for the government to subsidize anything. I am not for helping mega-cities become bigger shitholes than they already are.
Nevertheless, cities exist and are a fact of life. Government has tried to increase population and now reverts to immigration of third world replacements. Nihilism is never a solution, it is an end. Choose. My proposal is simply to learn if such incentives can work in the society as now exists.
"Nevertheless, cities exist and are a fact of life."
I have no problem with cities; mega-cities are a problem. Small—to medium-sized cities, such as those in the Midwest, are most desirable. To me, cities start to be undesirable above 600,000, but of course, there are other mitigating factors.
"Government has tried to increase population and now reverts to immigration of third world replacements."
I am not a fan of government; the smaller, the better. The government should protect the populace and not much more.
People in cities also often only live there temporarily, moving to the suburbs to have kids. So the low fertility of urban areas is not just inflated by the type of people who choose to live there, but also by “fertility drain” of urban residents
30% of children born in the US are 3rd children? This seems crazy to me. I suppose it makes sense when considering statistics about 45% of women being childless by 2030, but it does not align with my intuition.
Still thinking about this, how can the math shake out? 35% first children, 30% second, 30% third, 5% fourth?
I'm not buying the square footage argument. For most of human history people were living in single room abodes and still popping out babies left and right. Here in Hawaii multigenerational housing is normal often with each generations entire family living in a single room in a shared house (grandparents bedroom 1, adult child one and his spouse and kids bedroom 2, adult child 2 and family bedroom 3, cousin one and his family living room, cousin two and family garage) and the Filipino and Micronesian ghettos are still popping kids out kids left and right in those conditions.
I myself was raised in a two bedroom trailer with three opposite sex siblings and two sets of bunk beds until adulthood in the Midwest. I and my wife raised our two kids in a 300 sq ft studio and that was in modern times, my youngest left two years ago. My grandmother had fourteen kids in a four bedroom house.
There maybe a cultural stigma with it where people convince themselves they can't have kids because not enough room but that isn't the argument you are making, you are making one that square footage unto itself matters in a significant way and I'm like your Carl/Winegard in not buying it, neither history nor realty bare that out. I'll concede maybe at some level there is a direct correlation but it's well above fertility replacement level, i.e. there is probably a floor of around one kid per 100 sq ft but it's nowhere near 1 per 1000 sq ft as you are implying. And even that might be too high, I spent a lot of time as a homeless case manager for families and plenty of US homeless families were breeding just fine in tents, cars, and even while living for years in mass shared dorms of emergency shelters.
If people want kids, they'll have them. That's a culture problem, not a housing problem.
'Consider Sydney and Perth in Australia, where the TFR is a healthy 2.0 in the expensive but family-friendly suburbs but is an ultra-low 1.0 in the apartment-centric core.'
This is the problem with a lot (not all) articles concerned with fertility: failure to stratify, as though within-country populations are monolithic.
Central Sydney is *full* of homosexuals. Central Perth didn't use to be; maybe it is now. SW Sydney is packed with Muslims (again I don't know about south Perth). I'm not saying that housing density doesn't matter, but intra-population differences like these should be taken into account.
I find this fascinating, it's a subject that we should be seriously concerned about in the West, especially in Europe where land is far more densely populated.
There are serious problems in using population density as a measure of how many people are living in close proximity to each other. Take the UK as an example, population density is 208 per sq km. However much of Scotland, Wales and the North of England is empty moor land populated by a few farmers and some sheep.
The pop density of the South East of England is 492 per sq km while the pop density of London is 5854 per sq km. Are people in London, many of whom live in those high rise flats, provided by the state, having kids? The fertility rate is 1.39, even with a large proportion of first generation migrants and muslims living in London. The "cheap apartments" theory seems to be bunk.
Thank you for this great article. While neither side of the debate can assert to a scientific certainty whether density does or does not contribute to low population and birth rate, it's a problem well worth pondering. I learned a lot from this.
This is one of the more unconvincing articles I've read. Stilted by the libertarian rationalist moment we're currently in, but completely myopic and vacant.
The reason developers don’t build large apartments is obvious – small flats are more profitable on a per sq m basis. Childless couples have more money and need less space than families with children.
I would like to point out that any time somebody says, "you know a great example of this is Monaco"... You can probably through the argument in the trash. The dynamics of Monaco are like San Marino and Macau, just not a civilizational building model, and artificial economies dependent on the larger countries they orbit