Urban fertility is markedly lower than rural fertility. In the U.S., for example, rural women ultimately have about .24 more children than urban women. The obvious story is that (a) urban housing is more expensive, so (b) urban women live in smaller homes, which (c) makes having kids less pleasant. Raising my four children in a two-bedroom DC apartment would have meant much more stress and much less sleep than raising them in my suburban McMansion.
On second thought, though, perhaps this obvious story is wrong. Maybe the real story is selection. People who don’t want many kids choose to live in cities and enjoy their many child-unfriendly amenities. People who want many kids, in contrast, make the opposite choice. Popular stereotypes tell us that couples routinely “move to the suburbs to raise a family.” Could this explain the whole fertility pattern?
There are many empirical strategies you could use to approach this issue, but here’s one that’s clean and simple: Look at fertility in city-states. Unlike people in virtually every other country on Earth, the citizens of city-states have greatly restricted opportunities to “move to the suburbs to raise a family.” So how does their child-bearing respond?
The sample is admittedly small: Officially, there are only Singapore, Monaco, and Vatican City. We should throw out the Vatican for obvious reasons. But given their history and “One Country, Two Systems”, Hong Kong and Macau should count, too. Results:
City-State Total Fertility Rate
Hong Kong 1.19
Macau .95
Monaco 1.53
Singapore .83
There are very low rates, but how do they compare to those in regular countries with similar cultures? The TFR in mainland China is 1.60, far above the rates for Hong Kong, Macau, or Singapore. You could argue, though, that highly-developed Taiwan is the better comparison country. Its TFR is now 1.13 – comparable to Hong Kong, but still well above Macau or Singapore. The obvious comparison country for Monaco is France, with a TFR of 2.07.
Overall, then, I say city-states credibly support the (high housing costs –> small homes –> few children) causal chain. If you know of better evidence for or against, please share in the comments.
READER COMMENTS
Christophe Biocca
Feb 24 2020 at 9:39am
You’ve used the GSS in the past, there’s res16, mobile16, and childs variables. Unfortunately I can’t find one describing the density of the current area.
Scott Sumner
Feb 24 2020 at 11:14am
Good post. There’s another possible causal factor from city to fertility, beyond housing. Let’s say that cities have lots of entertaining diversions and rural life is dull. Children are a sort of consumption good, which makes life in rural areas more enjoyable. And they may help on the farm.
Hazel Meade
Feb 26 2020 at 4:58pm
Well, also, it’s hard to find the time to enjoy all those entertaining diversions when you are busy taking care of young children. And the suburbs have more of the entertainments that appeal to children and their parents – swimming pools and parks. The swimming pools in outer suburbs are much nicer and newer than the ones in cities – if they even exist in cities. Lots of suburbs have community pools.
Mark
Feb 24 2020 at 11:59am
I don’t think the high housing costs theory is persuasive because urban housing has only become more expensive than suburban housing (per square foot) recently. As recently as the 2000s, suburban housing in a good school district in my (mid-size) metro was actually more expensive per square foot than urban housing. Moreover, many cities in the Rust Belt actually have very cheap housing yet tend to still have low fertility compared to suburban and rural areas (especially if you control for ethnicity and income).
I think it is primarily cultural. In an urban setting, there is a lot more to do with your time so you have less time to spend with kids. As more entertainment becomes available at home, this may suppress fertility in suburban and rural areas too. Another factor is that the population density in urban areas is high so you don’t feel the need to add more people as much. This would also explain Taiwan, which is very densely populated despite not being a city-state. It is quite reasonable from an evolutionary standpoint that the desire to reproduce would be suppressed where one’s environment is signaling possible overpopulation. Moreover, in a city, your friends and social contacts are more likely to not have children, making the choice to not have children seem more socially acceptable and comfortable while the choice to have 3+ looks odd.
Alexander Turok
Feb 24 2020 at 4:52pm
This was an anomalous U.S. specific situation and was due its specific racial situation. In most times and places urban areas are going to be more expensive, that’s why they build more there in the first place.
This is poor evolutionary reasoning. Humans can’t be adapted to conditions they’ve never lived in. We’ve never seen density even remotely like this. If there is a rational way to respond to our present conditions, it’s to have a lot more kids since the world is underpopulated from the standpoint of human population/carrying capacity, far more than it was historically. Selection is operating to do this (very slowly) as we speak.
Matthias Goergens
Feb 24 2020 at 12:50pm
It’s relatively easy for people with a Singaporean passport to move to other countries. Eg the US has a special allotment of visas. (Still probably not as easy staying in the same country, though.)
Warren Platts
Feb 24 2020 at 1:52pm
The difference is fully explained by differences in abortion rates tbqh. Urban women have much higher abortion rates–and this is a worldwide pattern.
People in rural environs are probably tend to be more religious and socially conservative and thus more likely to believe that abortion is morally wrong, plus access to abortion services within big cities is likely to be more convenient.
Fasih
Feb 24 2020 at 3:13pm
The difference in housing costs doesn’t quite explain it, at least not in Pakistan’s case. Let’s take Lahore–one of the biggest cities in Pakistan. The rents are exorbitantly high, yet the fertility rate is also probably the highest in Pakistan. Compare this to Sukkur–a relatively rich rural city. It has an evidently low fertility rate.
Consider Karachi too. The largest families are the ones that have the smallest homes. Just yesterday my Careem/Uber motorbike driver mentioned he lived in a one-bedroom apartment with his 6 children while lamenting how difficult it is to make ends meet nowadays. No one in Karachi has 6 children. It’s an aberration. Thus, the size of one’s home doesn’t seem to be a deterrent.
The discrepancy between rural and urban fertility rates has more to do with the populace’s mindsets, in Pakistan at least. Folks have this irrational belief that having more kids means good fortune. Having kids is almost a panacea. They keep on reproducing in the vain hope that one more child means 50% more wealth. And, usually, due to promotions and experience, as the years pass people do end up earning more. This only reinforces the belief that more kids = more wealth. Poverty makes people do weird things.
Alexander Turok
Feb 24 2020 at 4:54pm
How good is Pakistan’s system of caring for the elderly? More kids might make sense in that context.
Fasih
Feb 25 2020 at 12:42pm
Haha it’s nonexistent. There’s no system. No welfare state. There’s no such thing as even insurance here–not even for public servants, with some rare exceptions of course.
Joe Clave
Feb 24 2020 at 4:08pm
Insert “Why not both?” meme here.
Stéphane Couvreur
Feb 25 2020 at 3:11am
A common explanation is that children are (or, at least, used to be) an asset if you have a rural lifestyle, but a burden if you have an urban lifestyle. They can help out on the farm whereas they have a higher opportunity cost in a large city, including but not limited to housing costs (think career, entertainment, socializing).
Hazel Meade
Feb 26 2020 at 5:21pm
One could argue that cities allow people to living in a state of extended young-adulthood, not fully maturing into parenthood, as would be more natural. Cities offer a lot of entertainments for young single people who have no responsibilities, although this often leads to substance abuse and other poor lifestyle choices. It’s not that healthy to spend too much time just entertaining yourself. People who mature out of that phase and get married and have kids tend to leave for different places because they no longer see the value in those diversions.
Stéphane Couvreur
Feb 25 2020 at 3:47am
P.S. There are two possible reactions in the face of this demographic trend: revert to a higher TFR or adapt to the new TFR. I just bought but haven’t read The Population Problem in Pacific Asia (2019), in which Stuart Gietel-Basten makes the case for the second option. His main argument is that both pro- and anti-natalist policies have much less effect than is commonly believed, even in extreme cases such as India, China, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, Singapore. So we have no choice but to adapt our institutions, which can be quite hard (I live in France where we are currently trying to reform our pay-as-you-go pension system). However, I’m not sure how a TFR around 1 can play out in the long run… Are there countervailing forces which might make people want to have a second child at a certain point? As Tyler Cowen would say: solve for the equilibrium!
Mark Z
Feb 25 2020 at 5:19pm
To what extent have countries with low TFR tried just outright paying people cash to have (or adopt and raise) more children? It seems like most efforts focus on providing various benefits, which sometimes seems like beating around the bush.
Stéphane Couvreur
Feb 26 2020 at 5:21am
This already exists. In France, many benefits are tied to having children and raising children: tax reductions, direct cash benefits, housing benefits, cash benefits at the beginning of the school year, vacation benefits, reduced prices on subway and train tickets. I doubt if these have a large effect on the TFR, though, because the sums are not large and because cash cannot satisfy every human need.
Doug
Feb 25 2020 at 1:46pm
A third possibility is social/cultural effects. The proximate cause around when to have kids is often people benchmarking themselves to their peers.
A 30 year old Utahan who sees all of their friends and same-aged relatives settled down with multiple kids of their own most likely feels a lot more pressure/encouragement to start having kids in the near-future. In contrast a 30 year old Brooklynite may want kids in the abstract long-term, but looking around at their childless social circle probably feels like there’s no reason to start now.
Obviously this mechanism still has to be driven by some upstream process that’s making urbanites as a group less fertile. But the distinction is subtly important. For example let’s say the ultimate cause is the relative price is housing. Without peer effects we’d expect wealth urbanites to have a smaller fertility gap viz-a-viz wealthy suburbanites. However with peer effects, they might still be less prolific, not because they feel the sting of housing costs directly, but rather because they’re internalizing community norms.
Hazel Meade
Feb 26 2020 at 4:55pm
Well, there’s a lot of factors other than housing space involved, I should think.
Suburbs are better for raising children for many reasons:
It’s safer – there’s less traffic, fewer people around, fewer strangers.
Fewer people also means fewer drunks and homeless people.
There’s more green spaces, playgrounds and swimming pools that provide wholesome entertainment to young children.
There’s fewer bars and clubs and older single adults that provide unwholesome entertainment to older children.
There’s less pollution, the housing stock is newer, so there’s less risk that your kid is going to eat lead paint.
The schools are better.
In short it’s pretty clear to mean that cities are great for single adults who are looking to socialize with other single adults, but not so great for kids. People have naturally sorted themselves into suburbs vs. cities based on where they are in life and whether they have kids or not.
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