PaulHoule
5 hours ago
A scan of the paper seems to show that they don't consider the confounding influence of urban density. Humans don't seem to have innate "quorum sensing" the way bacteria do, but expensive housing is likely to have something to do with it
https://www.pacificresearch.org/housing-costs-drove-the-majo...
not to mention the perception (if not reality) of an unsafe environment
https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-25-00236.html
and between leftists dogpiling in big cities where their votes don't count and those cities making it close to impossible to build housing that has to be a factor, together with individualism, anti-natalism, etc.
dlcarrier
an hour ago
Metro areas in the south still have higher fertility rates: https://www.statista.com/statistics/432838/us-metropolitan-a...
If it were just a matter of population density, not just metro area population, then low-density high-population metro areas, like those on the west coast, would still have high fertility rates, but they are lower than the high-density high-population metro areas on the east coast.
There seems to be a much stronger correlation to culture or general location than population density.
FiatLuxDave
35 minutes ago
Rarely have I seen someone shoot down their own argument with a link quite as effectively as this.
You might want to google those cities, since every single one that I've checked is a small population city surrounded by rural area.
Your argument about cultural influence might be more persuasive if you compared larger cities.