Yesterday, Tyler Cowan mentioned in the Marginal Revolution blog that he wished books on urban areas “would spend more time discussing whether dense urban areas are simply a fertility trap.” I’m not going to write a book about it, but it may be one more reason why planners’ mania for density is a bad idea.
There appears to be a correlation between state fertility rates and land-use regulation aimed at increasing urban densities. Click image to go to a Wikipedia article on fertility rates by state.
A fertility trap, sometimes called a low fertility trap, is a situation where a nation’s birth rate has declined below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Within a generation, this leads to a reduction in the number of young people working, which means — in a country that has a social security system, as most developed countries do — the number of older people that each young person must support increases.
This has become a serious demographic problem for nations around the world. As various lists of fertility rates reveal, the only nations producing more than replacement numbers tend to be poor, developing countries, while nations in Europe, North America, and many parts of Asia are well below replacement rates.
Lower birthrates are commonly ascribed to better educational systems for women. This puts them into the work force and reduces the number of years that they might be willing to bear and care for children. But this doesn’t necessarily reduce birthrates to 1.1, which is the rate found in Korea. France, Australia, Sweden, and the United States are all around 1.8, which is still below replacement but well above South Korea.
China, of course, long had a one-child-per-family policy, at least in urban areas, yet it has an overall birthrate of 1.7, which is nearly as high as in the U.S. and well above Singapore, South Korea, and other countries that haven’t overtly tried to discourage child bearing.
The first time I heard low birth rates associated with density was a video about Russian demographics by Peter Zeihan. “Krushchev forced everybody into condos which reduced the birth rate,” he observed.
In 1965, Russian urban planners published a book titled The Ideal Communist City that argued that everyone should live in tiny apartments in mid-rise or high-rises. This would allow everyone to travel by mass transit and avoid the need for automobiles, traffic congestion, and urban sprawl. (The book is downloadable and my review of it and its relationship to American urban planning is here.)
The planners hypothesized that the ideal family size was four and that adults needed no more than 225 square feet of living area plus 50 to 75 square feet per child. Based on this, they proposed apartments of 600 square feet per family, which was what was built throughout the Soviet Union and numerous eastern European countries.
And not just in communist countries. We tend to think of North Korea as “the bad guys” and South Korea as “the good guys,” but until about 1988 South Korea was almost as much of a dictatorship as North. One of the dictates was that nearly all new housing should be in concrete high rises, just like the Ideal Communist City.
The problem is that planners were completely wrong about 225 square feet being sufficient living area per adult and 600 square feet per family. People being stuck in these tiny apartments made more space available by having smaller families.
A lot of thing influence fertility rates, but the above map showing fertility rates by state suggests that land-use policies aimed at densification are one of them. In the United States, such policies have been implemented mainly in coastal states as well as Colorado. With a few exceptions, states that haven’t tried to force denser cities have the highest fertility rates.
I don’t regard this as absolute proof. There are plenty of good reasons to oppose densification policies, including their effects on housing prices, crime, traffic congestion, and the costs of urban services. But if fertility rates are important, and anyone looking at the future of the Social Security Trust Fund would have to agree they are, then this is one more strike against densification.
i think this is where being a nation of immigrants helps us.
what labor we don’t produce, we import. we just have to make sure they are net additions to the labor pool to support future safety net obligations
As oriiginal I’d assume population was a good thing, geopolitical distribution….The Mauthusian catastrophe wasn’t defeated merely postponed. The biggest threat to developed nations and geopolitical stability worldwide is rampant population growth, especially the 3rd world which now constitutes more than 2/3 of the world population.
Population increases throughout history were curtailed by disease, famine, and war. Efforts by civilized world to curb said deaths have been successful. However these poor nations now have a population saved, cannot absorb the resulting population explosion of population increases. Pakistans population since 1950 quadrupled, not its wheat production…..
The conflict in Kosovo was caused by immigration from high-birth rate Albania. Perpetual fighting is the result of millions of homeless people wandering about due to population explosions somewhere else. Americans are aware of the immigration problem in central America…. caused by high birth rates in Mexico and latin countries. With no work in the countryside and little suitable land to farm, surplus people migrate to cities which become megacities and reside in squalor. Half the people on Earth now live in cities; rife with geopolitical immigration issues, poverty, crime problems.
Discontent in Africa and Muslim world is largely byproduct of their population that grew faster than their economy/GDP. The US Military struggled to maintain social order in the fairly modern city of Baghdad with its five million residents, but the prospect of a military conflict in a megacity would be catastrophic. Since poor megacities operate near potential conflict zones, any disruption because of armed conflict will result in catastrophe when a city of 10-20 millions supply chain grinds to a halt.
Third Worlders die from common diseases like dysentery, diarrhea and treatable STDs , which can be treated with antibiotics, yet they have no money to buy them. The developed world has donated crates of deugs and doctors with to poor nations to save lives, but then having saved them; who will feed and house these millions of jobless people breeding faster than rabbits? China suffered from chaos caused by overpopulation for decades until the communists took action, limiting women to one child with the threat of forced sterilization if they had a second. As draconian as that may benit solved a huge issue….albeit created another.
Many in developed nations are ignorant of these issues and denounce any aid to family planning organizations that promote contraceptives, sterilization, or abortion. Conservatives in general have done terrible job denouncing pregnancy aversion medicine….. They have never witnessed malnourished babies discarded on the roadside and seem unaware that uncivilized people produce large families when they cannot even feed themselves. Starvation, disease, and war are nature’s way of correcting these imbalances and spending billions of dollars to ship food and medical aid to permanent refugee camps makes the problem worse. We did exactly that in Somalia, height of food shortage international aid, protected by UN peacekeeping. Somalians moved to cities, agricultural workers tempted by free food, stopped working, cities like Mogadishu tripled in population, social services and public order ground to a halt. Militant gangs hopped up on drugs and armed with arms from collapsed Soviet state ransacked food supply….
This threatens the developed world with mass migration, international crime, terrorism, piracy and small scale warfare. This chaos is man-made, among the plus billion people on Earth who are best described as “uncivilized.” They can’t read or write, and many do not even understand what causes pregnancy. Average iQ in Sub-Saharan Africa is 66……..Above retardation but below threshold for recognized social acceptance endeavor or scientific/industrial progress. Only 1 out of 2 million have genius iQ (140>) only 1 in 200,000 gifted (100 >)to develop, work or repair technologies, only 1 in 2000 in geopolitical stability threshold (90>) to retain learned technical/job skills or fix critical infrastructure. Yet fertility rate average having 8 kids……
The next real pandemic or instigated conflict will be a humanitarian crisis.
There’s several hypotherical global conflicts where such human population centers pose such challenge.
– Chinese Civil War
– Tibetan revolution
– Latin American War
– Africa pandemic, humanitarian aid uprising.
– Israel-MidEast conflict
freddieM,
Yes, having relatively open borders definitely helps. I believe that opponents of immigration, who are often working-class people who have seen their jobs exported to other countries, have misplaced their anger. The immigrants aren’t the problem; they’re the solution because more people means more consumers which means more local jobs. To the extent that we have problems, they have more to do with the emigrating jobs.
Orthodox Jews live at very high densities and have more children on average. It seems to me that culture and access to birth control are the main determining factor.
Israeli Orthodox Jews have a mission which overrides other considerations. In the USA, density harms the quality of life. Thus, Orthodox with a similar, but not identical, mission, move away from density.
Culture, access to birth control, and education are definitely factors. The question is whether density is also a factor. My guess is that it is in places where people are forced to live in high-density areas because government land-use policies have denied them access to low-density housing.
It seems that culture and access to birth control are the main factors. Perhaps banning child labor is a factor as well.
In your own data, density differences seem to only produce small fertility differences. It could just be a case of self selection, that people who prefer to have larger families tend to choose lower densities.
Pharisee,
The problem is that some people don’t have a choice about living in lower densities because government regulations effectively mandate high densities everywhere. If people don’t have room for children, they seem to have fewer of them. Urban density differences among U.S. states seem to correlate with different fertility rates.
Antiplanner
Where exactly are these high densities mandated, I would love to live there, because most of America is zoned for single family housing.
The Antiplanner often sends me wandering through the internet looking for interesting and useful data. Today I discovered … zpatlas.com … which has data on “Zip Codes with the Highest Population Density in the United States.”
http://zipatlas.com/us/zip-code-comparison/population-density.htm
The densest zip code in the US is 10162 with a population of 1,726 or about 152,000 per square mile. Second is 10028 with a population of about 45,000 or about 126,000 per square mile. Both in Manhattan.
And of course, North Dakota is quite different.
In the US, we have quite a bit of freedom to choose where and how we want to live. Trying to change that will, I hope, be impossible.
The author wrote:
“In 1965, Russian urban planners published a book titled The Ideal Communist City that argued that everyone should live in tiny apartments in mid-rise or high-rises. This would allow everyone to travel by mass transit and avoid the need for automobiles, traffic congestion, and urban sprawl”
This is a perfect description of the land use policy of the city of Los Angeles. Rather than have fewer children, Family Millennials simply move away and the employers follow the Millennials out the door. Now the city and state have a new solution: tear down single family neighborhoods because they are racist.