In my new column in Taki’s Magazine, I review a new academic paper hypothesizing that the steady fall in the birthrate might be due in part to the steady rise in racial diversity:
Steve Sailer
July 10, 2024
The U.S. total fertility rate briefly exceeded the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman’s lifetime during the Housing Bubble of 2006–2007 but has since dropped steadily, hitting a new record low of 1.62 in 2023. Total births fell 2 percent last year to under 3.6 million, the lowest total since the Birth Dearth of the 1970s:
Now, two finance professors, Umit G. Gurun and David H. Solomon, have posted a preprint of their paper “E Pluribus, Pauciores (Out of Many, Fewer): Diversity and Birth Rates.” They suggest there may well be a causal connection between the two major demographic trends of the age: the growth in diversity and the decline in fertility:
In this paper, we document a new and important stylized fact linking the central demographic changes of our time. Women living in areas of higher racial diversity robustly have fewer children.
Read the whole thing there.
increasingly common "Diversity Is Our strength" L
I don't think I want to see that chart split between native and foreign born women.
What are the areas they examined--zip codes, city, county? Presumably, big city centers (which used to attract young singles) are more diverse than the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas many moved to after they married, so this isn't terribly surprising, or did they control for that?
I wonder what new public housing does to the the birthrate in the surrounding area, since spreading them around became fashionable 30 years ago.