Interesting food for thought. I get skeptical when this gets to explanations, especially when it veers off into culture war shit which I firmly believe is mostly irrelevant.
Fertiiity falls in cities globally regardless of ideology. It falls in “woke” cities and in Islamic theocracies and in very Catholic Poland and in communist dictatorships. It falls in cities regardless of race or culture. Changing the ideology will have no effect or there would be cities in the world that defy the trend.
One first principles idea that is mentioned is that cities are physically unfriendly to large families due to plain old space constraints. Add to that the fact that urban real estate tends to be subject to a “law of rent” effect that makes stable living arrangements hard to get and even harder for large families. If you ask younger people why they aren’t having kids real estate cost is high on the list.
I think it makes sense to look for others. A lot of “nudges” and inconveniences can have a large cumulative net effect.
It’s also worth asking if humans might be prudent predators. We might have an instinctive reduction in fertility and related drives when we see a lot of humans around, since continuing to breed heavily in that case can in a natural environment lead to a boom bust cycle that can cause extinction. This seems fairly likely to me.
One boring answer is that if this is a civilization survival problem we may have to do what we do in other cases where automated market and social mechanisms don’t solve problems: we may have to subsidize reproduction. We may have to basically pay people to have at least two or three kids.
An answer like that doesn’t get clicks and doesn’t feed into anyone’s culture war crusade but it could work.
Another possibility is to strongly push remote work and decentralization of industries with things like tax incentives. Maybe too much urban centralization is a death trap. Easy sell for me. Unfortunately that is now a culture war issue with the same people (the right) freaking out about birth rates being the same people calling for more work hours and ending remote work.
The right seems to believe this is a problem but is unwilling to do anything about it that doesn’t place the entire burden for addressing the problem on women and only women. I suppose that is getting political but it seems flatly true if you look at what’s being pushed and what isn’t.
Interesting food for thought. I get skeptical when this gets to explanations, especially when it veers off into culture war shit which I firmly believe is mostly irrelevant.
Fertiiity falls in cities globally regardless of ideology. It falls in “woke” cities and in Islamic theocracies and in very Catholic Poland and in communist dictatorships. It falls in cities regardless of race or culture. Changing the ideology will have no effect or there would be cities in the world that defy the trend.
One first principles idea that is mentioned is that cities are physically unfriendly to large families due to plain old space constraints. Add to that the fact that urban real estate tends to be subject to a “law of rent” effect that makes stable living arrangements hard to get and even harder for large families. If you ask younger people why they aren’t having kids real estate cost is high on the list.
I think it makes sense to look for others. A lot of “nudges” and inconveniences can have a large cumulative net effect.
It’s also worth asking if humans might be prudent predators. We might have an instinctive reduction in fertility and related drives when we see a lot of humans around, since continuing to breed heavily in that case can in a natural environment lead to a boom bust cycle that can cause extinction. This seems fairly likely to me.
One boring answer is that if this is a civilization survival problem we may have to do what we do in other cases where automated market and social mechanisms don’t solve problems: we may have to subsidize reproduction. We may have to basically pay people to have at least two or three kids.
An answer like that doesn’t get clicks and doesn’t feed into anyone’s culture war crusade but it could work.
Another possibility is to strongly push remote work and decentralization of industries with things like tax incentives. Maybe too much urban centralization is a death trap. Easy sell for me. Unfortunately that is now a culture war issue with the same people (the right) freaking out about birth rates being the same people calling for more work hours and ending remote work.
The right seems to believe this is a problem but is unwilling to do anything about it that doesn’t place the entire burden for addressing the problem on women and only women. I suppose that is getting political but it seems flatly true if you look at what’s being pushed and what isn’t.