E Pluribus, Pauciores (Out of Many, Fewer): Diversity and Birth Rates

Abstract: In the United States, local measures of racial and ethnic diversity are robustly associated with lower birth rates. A one standard deviation decrease in racial concentration (having people of many different races nearby) or increase in racial isolation (being from a numerically smaller race in that area) is associated with 0.064 and 0.044 fewer children, respectively, after controlling for many other drivers of birth rates. Racial isolation effects hold within an area and year, suggesting that they are not just proxies for omitted local characteristics. This pattern holds across racial groups, is present in different vintages of the US census data (including before the Civil War), and holds internationally. Diversity is associated with lower marriage rates and marrying later. These patterns are related to homophily (the tendency to marry people of the same race), as the effects are stronger in races that intermarry less and vary with sex differences in intermarriage. The rise in racial diversity in the US since 1970 explains 44% of the decline in birth rates during that period, and 89% of the drop since 2006.

I asked demographer Lyman Stone if I should take this seriously. His characteristically firm reply is below:

It’s nonsense.

1) They’re explaining change in kids-in-the-house, NOT fertility. Kids-in-house is more similar to completed fertility and has declined like 40% less than total fertility.

2) They include adult children living at home in their kids-in-house measure, so if adult-kids-at-home has risen (it has), that biases their estimates.

3) Regardless, it seems notable in table 3 that the effect gets bigger the more narrowly you define the categories. Ancestry has the biggest effect, it’s 50% bigger than race. They don’t tell us the standard errors, but from the t stats it seems ancestry is highly significantly higher than just race. This I think matters for interpretation: if German-Americans are declining to marry Irish-Americans in 2010… are we actually measuring homophily or are we measuring the degree of segmentation in social life? You can imagine a situation with no homophilous preferences at all, but where individuals just have highly segregated social lives, and so the results are as we see. I’m kinda skeptical the ancestry results are consistent with the idea that this is preference based since the ancestry categories are kind of ludicrously specific, cross-ancestry marriages in ACS are like…. 60% of marriages I think? and many people don’t even know somebody’s ancestry apart from race. And, spoiler: ancestry HHI hasn’t changed at all.

4) One thing I do find interesting is the authors’ argument about self-ID. They suggest that it matters how we perceive ourselves: a huge share of increase in diversity is a shift in people who formerly would have been categorized as “black” or “white” now being coded as “multiracial.” I’m also concerned that they used inconsistent categories: the same population is more diverse using 2020 census form than using 2010 or using 2000 or 1960, etc.

5) They don’t show the first stage results or descriptives which is always a red flag to me.

6) They’re doing a weird thing with timing and fixed effects. Kids-in-house is a measure of completed fertility: those kids were born years or decades earlier. But they’re linking that completed fertility to diversity right now, not “diversity when the mother was 18” or whatever. They seem to think their huge array of fixed effects is addressing this issue, but it just seems totally wrong to me. They should be using diversity that obtained in mother’s state of birth over the course of the first 25 years of her life, not diversity right now after she had kids.

7) There’s a correlation of like 0.02 between any measure of diversity and any measure of fertility at the state level, in cross section or panel. For a variable that explains 90% of the decline, it’s amazing it has zero explanatory power in the descriptive data.

I appreciate that economists are willing to look into unpopular possibilities, such as diversity having downsides. And Lyman’s comments do not firmly establish that diversity has no effect on birthrates – merely that this research needs more work before we have to take it seriously.

The post Stone: Diversity didn’t cause the baby bust appeared first on Market Urbanism.

But there are more fundamental reasons to choose to live in a metropolitan area. The narrow choice of city versus suburb is a balance of cost and amenities. But the bigger question – in which region should I make my home? – requires one to look on a higher plane.

Life satisfaction, for most of us, comes from deeply held commitments (stubborn attachments, one might say) to specific other people and, often, small voluntary associations. Most people cannot form those commitments at will. And most people do not open themselves to deep friendships unless they believe that the counterparty is committed to them.

Stubborn attachments obviously exist in rural areas and small towns – perhaps quite a bit more than in metropolitan areas, as Rod Dreher argues in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. But for an outside work-from-homer, that tightly woven community can be difficult to break into. Deeper connections require deeper commitments. Can Celestus credibly commit to staying in one, particular rural town? What if his job changes? What if there’s a nasty fight at the volunteer fire department – will he cut bait and move? He cannot credibly commit to remaining if the going gets tough.

Furthermore, moving to a distant rural area will make all of Celestus’ existing relationships harder to maintain, unless he has existing ties there.

Thus, Celestus is likely to be happiest in a metropolitan area where he already has some meaningful ties and where he has a plausible prospect of remaining anchored as his job and life evolve. That prospect will quietly change him, creating and meeting a greater capacity for satisfaction.

The deepest attachments, for most of us, are to family. And metropolitan areas are more probable places to enable a loose collection of relatives to live in proximity. Unless several extended family members happen to be footloose and like-minded, a move to a distant rural location will make holidays a chore – and remove those who care most about you from your daily life. Metropolitan areas have enough types of work to solve this coordination problem, either by choice or serendipity.

I’m blessed with an extended family that exemplifies this principle: when Furths grow up and move away from home, we often find kin where our jobs or educations take us. Thus my uncle in Columbus babysits his grand-niece and -nephew; my aunt in Los Angeles cooks real food for a sojourning nephew; two cousins shared a house in Fort Collins for a while; an elderly cousin moved from New York to a DC-area nursing home where several of us could visit regularly. Our Thanksgiving dinners feature nearness of geography as much as of blood.

Conversely, optimizing for amenities will also change one, usually for the worse. I watched dear friends attempt to take advantage of the pandemic by moving first to Europe and then to coastal California. The history and nature (respectively) were awesome. But they returned deeply unhappy and with less capacity than before for loving, and being loved, by any particular community.

The cover photo is by Andrew Kambel on StockSnap

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Both smart growth supporters and sprawl apologists focus on the needs of families with children: sprawl defenders argue that only suburbia can accommodate the desires of parents, while some smart growth types argue that cities should require lots of two- and three-bedroom units downtown because families need a lot of space.

But a current exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington suggests that this focus is a bit misguided.  The exhibit points out that nearly 30 percent of U.S. households are singles living alone.  Judging from all the planning-media blather about families, one might think that the housing market is focused on their needs, and that 30 percent or even more of the housing stock consisted of single-sized units.

But the exhibit points out that in fact, less than 1 percent of housing units are studios, and about 12 percent are one-bedrooms.  So family-oriented units are in fact overrepresented in the housing stock.

Larger units may  not dominate downtown, but they start to dominate pretty close to downtown.  For example, when I looked at zillow.com I discovered that downtown Pittsburgh is dominated by one-bedroom units, but in zip code 15203 just south of downtown, 3/4 of housing units available for rent or sale have two or more bedrooms, including 80 out of 115 rental apartment listings.    In zip code 15202 just northeast of downtown, 34 of 60 rental apartment listings, and 71 percent of all rental listings have two or more bedrooms.

Of course, Pittsburgh is a pretty family-oriented city.  But even in Washington’s 20036 zip code (a wealthy downtown neighborhood) 1/3 of all listings are for two or more bedrooms.  And if you go just two subway stops north to Cleveland Park (zip code 20008) 108 out of 174 listings have two or more bedrooms.

What about more suburbanized, car-dominated cities?  In Houston’s downtown 77002 zip code, the majority of units are two or more bedrooms.  And in Montrose, a nice intown area a few miles from downtown, 82 percent of listings (276 out of 336) fit this mold.

So except for the closest-in parts of the most transit-heavy cities, the overwhelming majority of listings are designed for one person living alone.  Why is this?  One possible reason is that zoning locks up most of every city for single-family housing.  Another reason might be that most older housing was built when there were fewer single people, and it may take the market a long way to catch up with changing demand.

The post what about singles? appeared first on Market Urbanism.