Fertile No More!
For more than a hundred years, Ireland was both the most religious and the most fertile country in Europe.
But in recent years, Ireland experienced rapid secularization, and its fertility fell to just 1.47 in 2024.
What happened to 🇮🇪, and what comes next?
🧵!

First, a bit of history.
By the 1800s, Ireland had become almost entirely reliant on just one crop. Potato blight struck in 1845, and soon famine and mass migration cut the Irish population from 8 million down to 4. Ireland's population is still well below its 1845 peak. 2/7

Getting old without ever getting rich
Thailand, with a TFR of just 0.95 in 2024, never even had a chance to get rich before its birthrate collapsed.
A look at how over-zealous family planning combined with cultural factors to put 🇹🇭 on a demographic downward spiral.
New 🧵!

Unlike its neighbors Korea and Taiwan, Thailand with a per-capita GDP of just $7000 never got to get rich before facing ultra-low birthrates.
For Thailand, the biggest cause was family planning run amok.
(Below, a wedding dress in Thailand made of entirely of condoms!) 2/9

The fastest fertility collapse in the world
In 2024 Chile recorded a fertility rate of just 0.88 births per woman, a drop of 23% in a year and 51% since 2015. No country has seen fertility fall as fast.
A look at how social changes have overwhelmed 🇨🇱 and threaten its future.
🧵!
In recent years, Chile has been wracked with protest. In 2018, there were some 151 feminist protests across the country.
Then from 2019 to 2021, these mixed with large youth-led anti-establishment protests, which turned violent and often resulted in brutal police responses. 2/7

South Dakota has the highest fertility of any US state and is the only state near replacement fertility.
Why is the birthrate so high in South Dakota and what lessons are there for the rest of America and the world?
🧵, please share!

https://twitter.com/LibertyCappy/status/1876859115441471931

First is religiosity. Some 50% of South Dakotans rate religion as very important in their lives, well above the US average of around 37%.
Higher religiosity is associated with higher fertility both in the US and worldwide. 2/10

How many people really understand the age-fertility curve?
A groundbreaking 2023 paper by Geruso et al. showed that fecundability (the ability of a woman to get pregnant) peaks at age 20 and has already dropped by 2/3 by age 33. This is far younger than almost anyone knew. 1/4

The most important way to solve the fertility crisis is to educate young people on how crucial it is to get started early on family. Achieving financial and career success may take a long time, but family can't wait very long! 2/4

https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1829717318995210406

The Baby-Money Index (BMI) beats GDP
There is a new metric that is much better than GDP for comparing nations! The "Baby-Money Index" combines national income (GNI) and fertility rate (TFR) to produce a better measure of a nation's true health. (via Atoms vs Bits)
🧵! We've known for a long time that GDP and GNI don't fully capture how the people of a country are doing.

In an effort to better measure human thriving the Human Development Index (HDI) was developed by the UN in 2010. 2/6

The first Thanksgiving marked the end of a period of hardship in which 52 of the Mayflower’s 102 passengers perished. Yet the 🚢 survivors now have 30 million descendants!
A look at how early America was able to grow so quickly, with lessons amid today's low birthrates!
🧵!

America's first three centuries produced the fastest sustained growth the world has ever known, as the US reached 76 million people by 1900. Most of this was due to high birthrates, not immigration!
Three factors drove this, religious belief, abundant space and early marriage. 2/

Why South Korea’s fertility is so low, and how it will be hard to reverse
The Land of the Morning Calm has a fertility of just 0.72 births per woman, lowest in the world. But low fertility in 🇰🇷 is caused by many factors that will be extremely hard to change.
🧵, please share!

On Halloween 2022, in the Itaewon District of Seoul, a crowd crush killed 156 people and shocked the country.
That incident is a good analogy for both educational and economic pressure, and the literal crowding of the whole country into one city, that is crushing fertility. 2/11

POPULATION GROWTH BROUGHT ABUNDANCE, NOT SCARCITY
Most people get the relationship between population and prosperity completely backward.
A look at the revolutionary work of Julian Simon, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley showing how population growth made us richer.
🧵, please share! Intuitively, it feels like more people should mean less for everyone. That is how most natural ecosystems work. We learned in school how the population of the rabbits (the resource) crashes when the population of foxes (the consumer) grows.
But humans aren't like that at all! 2/6

How "Smart Growth" Causes Housing Shortages and Hurts Birthrates
Portland, Oregon has a fertility rate of just 1.0 amid high housing prices and a shortage of single-family homes. Meanwhile, 98.9% of Oregon is rural!
How policies meant to stop sprawl are hurting birthrates, a 🧵!
It is no secret that the United States currently has a housing shortage that is contributing to low birthrates. The relationship between house affordability and fertility can easily be seen in maps.
But much of this scarcity is artificially caused by limits on suburbs. 2/8

International adoptions have fallen 95% in the United States, from 22,991 in 2004 to just 1,275 in 2023.

It's not a problem of demand. Many Americans would love to adopt internationally. But there are few children available to adopt with plunging birthrates in most countries. 🧵 It's not just adoptions to the US. This is a worldwide phenomenon. International adoption is almost impossible now.

Although abuse sometimes cited, the main reason many 'sending' countries including China and Russia have ended foreign adoption is collapsing fertility. 2/4

Can advanced economies have healthy birthrates?
It seems like an iron rule: as countries develop, their birthrates fall to really low levels.

But it's not set in stone. Economic success and healthy birthrates can go together!

A thread, please share! There is no question that the competition between work and family is fierce, leading some to suggest that capitalism itself is incompatible with healthy birthrates.

Can we have both economic success and healthy fertility? Yes! Let's explore. 2/12

https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1715971689287201204

When will the UK get serious about falling birthrates?
Fertility rates in the UK have plummeted in recent years to just 1.43 births per woman in 2023.

Fifty years of low fertility are dimming Britain's future, yet its leaders seem blithely unaware.
🧵, please share!

When asked this week about falling UK fertility, PM Keir Starmer had a hearty laugh. "What can you do?" he asked.

But British women when surveyed say they want around 2.2 children each, so a TFR of just 1.43 reflects both national crisis and a lot of personal heartbreak. 2/

Understanding plunging Nordic fertility
For years, the Nordic countries had healthy birthrates that were the envy of Europe, helped in part by some of the most generous family policies in the world. No longer.

A look at how cultural forces can overpower pronatal policy.
🧵!

In 2015, the fertility of the Nordics averaged 1.76 births per woman, similar the 1.84 level of the US.

By 2023, the fertility of the Nordic countries was just 1.44, well below the 1.62 of the US today.

This though Nordic child policy is what parents in 🇺🇸 dream of. Why? 2/6

From the Wall Street Journal yesterday, we see the headline, Parenting Is Hazardous to Your Health, the Surgeon General Warns.

But this headline is almost certainly false. Studies overwhelmingly show that both mothers and fathers live longer than non-parents on average!
🧵.
A study of 4 million Swedish men and women found that parents with children generally live longer than those without, and those with two children generally live longer than those with one child. 2/6

Elevating the Status of Motherhood Solves Low Birthrates: The Extraordinary Case of Mongolia
For 68 years, Mongolian leaders have given the Order of Maternal Glory to mothers. This raised the status of motherhood and helped forge a remarkably pronatal culture.
🧵, please share!
Mongolia's pro-motherhood culture stands out on a fertility map. Fertility in Mongolia has consistently been 2-3 times(!) higher than neighboring areas in recent years and it has been increasing over the past 20 years, even as its neighbors have seen birthrates plunge! 2/8

The Long Shadow of China's One Child Policy
China's one-child policy is over. Yet the fertility in China keeps falling, and was just 1.02 births per woman in 2023.

A look at China's history of brutal population control, and how echos of past policies reverberate today.
🧵.
China's one-child policy was finally ended in 2015. One impetus for its ending was the uproar over the forced abortion of Feng Jianmei in 2012, after graphic pictures went viral in China. 2/11

Why birthrates keep falling in Canada
Canada has enacted many pro-family policies, from parental leave to low-cost childcare. Yet its TFR has plunged from 1.60 to 1.25 in eight years.
What factors are driving this and how can 🇨🇦 and the rest of us change course?
🧵, please share.
For much of the 20th century, fertility rates in Canada were higher than in the United States. But now the fertility rate in 🇨🇦 is 23% lower than in 🇺🇸, which itself is at an all-time low.
There are several cultural and housing factors behind Canada's ultra-low birthrates. 2/11

Apartments in high-rises are inherently anti-family
The more of them you build, the lower fertility will be.
(Please share!)

As we confront the low-fertility crisis that is enveloping most countries, we need to understand the very low birth rates of cities in particular. One of the first facts of demography, immediately evident in the data and true almost everywhere, is that fertility is lower in urban cores than anywhere else.

Economists like Bryan Caplan claim that fertility is so low in cities mainly because of cost. If cost is the main reason birth rates are so low among people living in urban high-rises, then we should double down and keep building more of them until apartments are affordable enough to give us the baby boom we so desperately need.

But if fertility in apartment towers is low because this type of housing is inherently negative for family formation, then building ever more high rises is a very bad idea, because over time an increasing share of people will live in an anti-natal housing type.

How can we find out which of these answers is correct? Randomized controlled trials are surely impossible for something like this.

Fortunately, a great natural experiment exists. East Asian countries have been constructing apartment towers like crazy. In an apartment-building frenzy, the number of dwellings per capita has grown by 10-17% across Asia as a chart published in 2023 by John Burn-Murdoch shows. Meanwhile the number of dwellings per capita has grown slowly in Europe and has been stagnant in the Anglosphere.

And this housing is affordable for young people. Incredibly, the homeownership rate of young people in China is twice the rate of the US. The second chart is from 2017, when the average millennial was just 28 or 29. Some 70% of young Chinese were homeowners in 2017, a number that may be even higher now after much more additional building.

With so much housing being built, Asia should be having an incredible baby boom right about now, right?

Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is happening as Asian fertility has completely collapsed. In 2023 the total fertility rate was 0.72 births per woman in South Korea, 1.02 in China, 1.20 in Japan, 0.75 in Hong Kong and 0.86 in Taiwan. By contrast the TFR was 1.62 in the United States, 1.56 in New Zealand and 1.52 in Ireland. These Anglosphere numbers are not great but still twice the fertility of those East Asian countries. (‘Replacement fertility’ is about 2.1 births per woman.)

Why isn’t all that building in Asia yielding more babies? If you have travelled in East Asian countries as I have, you know that the housing that is being built is almost entirely in the form of high-rise apartment towers.

Below is Shanghai, TFR 0.54. That is only around half of the (already very low) Chinese level. At that rate, for every 100 people there would be only around 6.25 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren. It isn’t hyperbole to say that such numbers suggest civilizational collapse.

The same story is true in Seoul (TFR 0.54), Beijing (TFR 0.66) and Bangkok (TFR 0.8). In every instance, birth rates in these cities where housing is mostly high-rise apartments is far lower than for each nation as a whole.

It is not about small apartment size
A popular theory is that the cause of low fertility is that apartments in Asia are small and if you built larger, family-sized apartments, things would be just fine.

Wondering about that, I searched and found this: “Using transactions data, Colliers estimates that the average gross private apartment size is between 88 and 98 square meters across Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.” That is 947-1054 square feet, substantially bigger than the average apartment size in the United States (882 square feet).

One of my Shanghai readers responded to a recent post by noting, “I actually live in Shanghai, and most new developments here start at 1800sf/3br.” Another replied, “Most apartments built post 2000 in Shanghai are 3+ beds.”

I don’t have the data on the exact mix being built, but it is clear that plenty of the apartments in Shanghai are sized for families, and yet its fertility is mind-bogglingly low even by Chinese standards.

Fertility is far lower in apartment towers for a whole host of reasons beyond size and cost
Economists are fixated on things like price and price per square foot. But there are whole lot of other factors that make high rise towers particularly bad for families.

· Noise and privacy issues. Apartment living means you share walls and common areas with many neighbors. Kids, meanwhile, are noisy, messy, and often embarrassing. Even one screaming kid will be an imposition on your neighbors when walls are shared. Imagine three or four!

· Lack of a yard for kids to play in. A typical single-family home has far more usable space than a comparably sized apartment because of the yard. (Our family residence for instance has 15,000 square feet of yard, a third of an acre, which greatly reduces the sense of crowding we would otherwise feel as a family of eight.)

· General crowding and density. Demographer Lyman Stone, in a June 2024 paper entitled More Crowding, Fewer Babies: The Effects of Housing Density on Fertility found that density (more people in a geographic area) and crowding (more people in one’s immediate space) both contribute to low fertility and when you have both, as you typically do in apartment blocks, you get exceptionally low fertility.

Fifty years ago, a few miles from where I write this, at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, John B. Calhoun conducted his famous ‘mouse utopia’ experiments. Calhoun found that even when mice have everything they need in terms of food and shelter, they won’t reproduce in conditions of high crowding and density. Humans seem to be a lot like mice in this regard. (His paper, titled Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population, is riveting must-read because of how many of the neuroses of his mice seem to match what we see today, especially among people living in cities!)

None of these things would be made better by building more residential high-rises, and in many ways, conditions for families would be made worse!

Freeing up single family homes for young people? Hardly!
A few days ago, economist Scott Sumner tried to rebut arguments I raised on his blog TheMoneyIllusion:
“Some people argue that single family homes are better than high-rises for solving the fertility crisis. But even if that were true, it would help to build more high rises for single people and childless couples in places like LA, in order to free up more single-family homes for families with kids.”

@MattYglesias has made a similar argument responding my showing how anti-natal apartments tend to be.

Yet few older empty nesters giving are up their suburban houses to live in apartment towers. Instead, these apartment blocks draw mostly young people. My leafy DC suburb has many four- and five-bedroom houses occupied by only an older couple or even just a single widow. These houses would be perfect for a young family, but their older residents are mostly staying put.

It is possible that a few single-family homes may be freed up on the margins when you build high-rises, but mostly vast numbers of young people are enticed to live in apartments that are fundamentally anti-natal in character.

On a ten-day Japan trip with my family in September 2023 I saw a remarkable phenomenon where the building of apartment towers is leading to the loss of millions of single-family homes. Even though Japan is rapidly depopulating due to low birthrates, Tokyo is growing in population as it builds many high-rises and pulls young people in from across the country. Meanwhile millions of single-family homes across Japan, which would be perfect for families, are left vacant to decay. (Tokyo has the lowest fertility rate in all of Japan and constant building of residential high-rises in Tokyo drives what I have termed the Japanese Depopulation Conveyor belt of young people into the city!)

Building high-rise towers increases the share of people living in apartments, driving down fertility
If you plot the share of people living in apartments in a place against fertility, you find a robust negative relationship. The larger the share of people in a city that live in an apartment, the lower fertility will be. If you alter the mix of housing in the direction of more apartments, fertility will drop. This negative relationship is among the strongest evidence that apartments themselves are relatively anti-natal.

This relationship also holds on a national level. The greater the share of a country’s households that live in apartments, the lower its fertility rate will be. Spain, where around 70% of households live in apartments, has far lower fertility (1.13) than Australia (between 1.5 and 1.6), where only 15% live in apartments.

Since housing will be around generations to come, altering a country’s housing mix in the direction of apartments will have a particularly disastrous effect on birth rates in the long term. That seems like a very bad idea when demographic collapse is the risk we face.

Building housing is important, but that should mean quality single-family homes, not apartments in towers
House affordability matters a great deal for birth rates, as my own work shows. State-by-state, fertility is much higher when housing is more affordable in relation to local incomes. The economists are not wrong about this.

But housing type matters greatly for fertility, and most economists skip that part. Bryan Caplan’s 2024 graphic novel Build Baby Build is filled with pictures that look just like the above image of Shanghai. I know Caplan - he and his wife did not raise their family in environs like that. They raised their family in a single-family home in the tree-lined DC suburbs, as did other economists now advocating that we throw out limitations on height. Most of them have little appreciation for what that means.

(I met Caplan and discussed this topic one-on-one with him for more than an hour in a Zoom -- though he has refused so far to debate me publicly. He was friendly but said he would be convinced only if I could come up with the perfect analysis that matches every other variable – especially price per square foot for houses and apartments in the same place, good luck to me! I think the evidence that apartments in towers are anti-natal is already overwhelming.)

We can’t ignore the lessons of places like South Korea. After the Korean war, Korea saw a housing shortage and so began building big apartment buildings. Korea never stopped building them, and now around three in four Koreans lives in an apartment in a high rise - perhaps the highest rate of any country. This has contributed to the lowest fertility of any nation in the world, just 0.72. Korea will have a very difficult time raising birth rates, since all that anti-natal housing will be with them for generations to come. If trends continue, the demise of South Korea is in sight, and the wrong type of housing will be a big part of that story.

Everyone else should avoid making the same mistakes as East Asia has, by building in a way that helps and not hurts birth rates. (Many other factors matter too, like marriage, religiosity/culture and workism. I write plenty about those too.)

Please follow @MoreBirths for more on the global fertility crisis and how we can solve it.

Also see the thread that follows for many of my posts and threads on housing, density and birth rates.


In this thread I show how fertility is much lower in urban cores than anywhere else, using maps from around the world. 2/

https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1817590882947727713

The powerful negative impact of density on fertility as seen in maps
Amid a global crisis of low birth rates, we have to ask what is causing this. Urban density turns out to be very negative for birth rates, all over the world.
🧵, please share!

Germany
In every instance, fertility is lower in German cities than in the surrounding areas. This in spite of the fact that immigrants (who have higher fertility on average) are more likely to live in cities. 2/10

Why Poland's Birthrate is Collapsing
Poland's fertility will be just 1.1 births per woman in 2024, among the lowest in the world. This in a Catholic country with strict laws against abortion.
Why is fertility in 🇵🇱 so low and what can we learn?
🧵, please share.

The first issue is work. Poland has become a work-obsessed culture where the average person works 50% more hours than in neighboring Germany, and longer than almost every other country in Europe. 2/10