Just before Christmas last year, I wrote about the link between rising house prices and declining birthrates.
In a briefing for the Zillow Research blog, Jeff Tucker presents further evidence.
He starts with the (American) context:
“The U.S. baby bust started at the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, when the total fertility rate began falling. It dropped from a high of 2.12 per woman in 2007 to 1.93 by 2010.
“Most observers expected that fertility would rebound as the economy recovered, but instead the fertility rate has continued falling. In 2016, the most recent year with detailed birth records, the total fertility rate was down to 1.82, and preliminary data show it dropped to 1.76 in 2017.”
Might this have anything to do with house prices? Tucker takes a look at the data:
“If rising home values contributed to fewer babies being born, we would expect to see that birth rates fell more in places where home values rose more. Birth records from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics show that this is, in fact, what happened: There was a strong negative relationship between home value growth and birth rate change across large counties in the U.S. for 25- to 29-year-old women, from 2010 to 2016”
25-to-29-year-olds, by the way, are the age group “most likely to consider having a baby but not already own a home”. Anyway, here’s the key finding:
“On average, if a county’s home value increase was 10 percentage points higher than another county’s, its fertility rate fell 1.5 percentage points further…
“Counties with the largest home value increases had exceptionally large drops in fertility”
That would appear to be pretty conclusive, but there are some complications. For one thing, the average figures conceal a great deal of regional variation. The link between rising house prices and falling birthrates is much stronger in some parts of the country (especially “urban counties in the West and North East”) than others (especially the South and South West).
In the American Sun Belt, property is generally more affordable than in the big coastal cities – and a price rise from a lower base is going to be less of a hurdle than one from a higher base. Indeed, in a ‘cheap’ property market, appreciating house values may help create a sense of confidence that an area is ‘up-and-coming’ – always nice to know when if you’re planning to raise your kids there. However, in a property hotspot, further price rises may look like a crash waiting to happen. The last thing new parents need is to buy at the top of an overheating market.
For all of these reasons, we shouldn’t expect property price rises, even if uniform in percentage terms, to have the same impact on birthrates in different parts of the country.
Tucker also points out that whether the link between increasing house prices and decreasing birthrates is strong or not, we cannot assume the causal direction:
“One alternative explanation could be the possibility that there is clustering into certain counties of people with careers that pay well enough for expensive homes but make it difficult to have children before 30.”
This may well be part of the explanation – and, in the long-term, it might not make too big difference to population dynamics if childbirth is merely being delayed. However, the author notes that the latest figures show birthrates down for women in their thirties too.
That might reflect the fact that, as in the UK, American 30-somethings are less likely to be home owners than previous cohorts. (The average age of the American first-time buyer now stands at 35.2, which is up from the 2010 to 2013 figure of 32.5.)
Clearly, more evidence is needed to understand the precise balance of causal factors. But one thing is for sure: things won’t end well for a society that can’t afford the space nor the time for children.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeI’ve come to realize that not all Socialist leaders are Machiavelian zealots. Some are true believers in “The Theory.”
Socialists are actually very good at diagnosing problems because they spend all their time critiquing power structures. They are terrible at solving problems because their solutions don’t correspond to reality.
Many Fabian Socialists and Traditional Marxists hate Identity Politics and Postmodernism (Intersectionality or Modern Progressivism). But Modern Progressivism is a reaction to Socialism not working and not the failings of Capitalism. It’s the ole Trotsky dilemma. The idea that Communism would have worked under a Trotskyite USSR is patently absurd. Any ideology that intentionally splits social groups into a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil is doomed to fail.
You will not find a Modern Progressive that wasn’t initially schooled on elements of Class Warfare. You don’t just go Woke. It’s a progression based on seeing the world through a Lens of Group Oppression and not Individual Rights.
I’m all for listening to this guy diagnose problems. Just don’t let him fix anything because they will conform to his balkanizing Theory of Group Rights.
He’s actually quite critical of identity politics in the book.
I’ve listened to him before. He’s a decent guy. I just find his empirical methods incomplete. If you’re going to diagnose a problem and then solve it, you can’t just ignore all the past failures of Socialism and chalk it up to Capitalist subversion. The record is pretty clear at this point that Socialism can’t sustain itself. It needs a host like Capitalism that can produce growth and stability.
At the very best, all Socialism is going to do is induce some synthetic middle ground like Stakeholder Capitalism where the State controls the means of production.
What if his slogan were Bring Back Capitalism, but properly, and he teams up with the likes of Bernie and Reich?
Haha I’m listening if you have more details
Stakeholder Capitalism … I believe Mussolini had a word for that, no?
Indeed.
This is the dingus who said that What’s-her-face ought to be kicked out of the UK because she had the temerity to say that, maybe, perhaps, at some level, borders matter, right?
He has maybe, perhaps, at some level, lost it a bit there
Self goal I guess.
How can she be kicked out of a country if he doesn’t believe in borders.
If you don’t believe in borders, how would you expel anyone, they could just return at any time, no passports, no borders, no rules
Ah, you spotted the flaw in his logic. I think Taleb must have had dear old Yanis in mind when he came up with the notion of IYI.
The man is an historically illiterate fool. His assertion that millions of white Europeans decamped and flooded Africa, Asia and South America is absurd.
For example, the Indian Census of 1891, taken at the height of the Raj, documented that there were only 125,945 British residents out of a total population of 287 million people – 0.043%% of the population.
It doesn’t take much thought to work out that at a time when travelling even short distances was slow, expensive and dangerous, millions of mostly impoverished Europeans were not zipping across the oceans and flooding Africa and Asia
Certainly not to Asia and Africa, but they did zip to ’empty’ places like Australia, New Zealand and Canada – and subsequently became the majority population.
Agreed, but that happened over hundreds of years. First attempts to set up colonies on the east coast of Canada were in the 1500’s. Significant populations (ie: thousands) didn’t permanently settle until 1700’s, and didn’t really become dominant in many areas until 1800’s. In contrast, 1 million immigrants flooded into Germany alone in just a couple of years. If you do the math and extrapolate what that will mean in just 10-15 years, it is not at all comparable to the European colonization of the Americas.
Yanis had his chance in Greece. Pretty much bankrupted the place and ruined the life opportunities for young Greeks who are leaving in their droves. But hey, the government employees got early retirement and good pensions.
I finally managed to finish my review of his book: https://glitches.substack.com/p/are-we-living-in-a-cloudalist-dystopia