Importantly, the housing market now assumes that two people will be contributing to a mortgage, which makes having one of you take significant time off to look after a child (or spending a very significant percentage of your income on childcare) tricky, to say the least.

One kid was doable for us. Two kids really stretched things and basically destroyed our savings (2 kids both costing £1k a month in nursery fees was not sustainable). A third kid would have meant either moving to a much cheaper house or some other significant financial compromise.

I would add some more factors along those lines:

- Many urban areas have even worse shortages of family housing. Availability of 2+ bedroom apartments is even worse than studios and 1-bedrooms. Many new multi family buildings have plenty of low-income units but no family units.

- Car seat laws are well intentioned but make it very annoying to transport children in car-dependent areas unless parents use their own car for everything.

- Childcare and education prices are very high. Of course, part of this cost is the cost of living of educators.

- Many industries are geared toward people with few or no children. Hotel rooms with capacity for more than two children are unusual, and most travel sites barely understand the idea of searching for such rooms. Even rooms with comfortable capacity for two children are a bit unusual — the common two-queen-bed configuration requires that kids share a bed.

When looking at that sort of graph you do need to hold in mind that we had a substantial period of our evolutionary history where owning a house wasn't an option because houses didn't exist. It isn't the lack of a house that is causing the drop in fertility - if it was, all animal species would die out with rare exceptions. Humans are perfectly capable, as a race, of population growth without any houses at all. Indeed, you might even find that the houses most of your ancestors lived in are illegal to build in many parts of the world by virtue of being too basic.

That suggests it is still a priorities question - people would much prefer to embrace the luxury and comforts of the modern world and work to maximise them rather than starting a family.

Evolution is such a terrible way to look at this. The incentives of a hunter-gatherer nomadic group of people living in prehistoric African savannah and the incentives of people living in a modern urban environment are worlds apart.

Back then it was probable that most children would just die before reaching maturity, and most humans would not live much past their early adulthood. Life was fulfilled by the most basic subsistence, and that was all.

I don't think most humans nowadays, be them rich or poor, would want to live in such an environment.

Am I soft because I enjoy playing videogames or watching a movie after my daughter is sound asleep in her girl's bedroom in a house with proper heating? Probably. I still wouldn't want to team up with my neighbor to go into the wilderness to hunt a boar while the wife and daughter freeze in a mud hut.

> That suggests it is still a priorities question - people would much prefer to embrace the luxury and comforts of the modern world and work to maximise them rather than starting a family.

When given a choice, people enjoy some mild comfort. Oh the horror.

Yes we're still the same evolutionary humans, but you can't set up a subsistence farm with your 8 children as free labour and go hunting in lower Manhattan.

Unless you're proposing mass de-urbanization and rolling back 100+ years of societal evolution it's practically just not all that relevant that this worked fine in an earlier era and humans could hypothetically just go back to slumming it medieval style.

> It isn't the lack of a house that is causing the drop in fertility

Find some 20 somethings in a major 1st world metro and ask them.

I'd propose that if you can't give your children a good life you shouldn't have them. It seems a comfortingly large chunk of the world agrees to some degree.

>if you can't give your children a good life you shouldn't have them

Which brings us neatly back to dropping fertility is driven by the divergence between salary and cost of housing. Bunch of young people looking at their budget and concluding society has made it impossible for them to provide said good life to a potential offspring

If you want the thread to do a couple of laps I'm game - this is the point where I point out homelessness was the normal standard of living for most of humanities evolutionary history. People are demanding a standard for their children that only the tinyest of slivers of prior generation has been capable of providing. If any were at all, after accounting for standards of medical care.

Being unable to afford a home isn't the major factor here, that has pretty much always been a factor. It is standards, priorities and options changing.

You seem dense and fairly committed to not seeing the fact that we've pretty much tapped the developable wilds, and set bars so high in terms of barriers of economic entry you can't just plop out a kid and rely on opportunity existing anymore. My grandmother was one of 13 children reared on a farm. Each of them could meaningfully contribute to the operation of the farm back then in ways that would be non-starters today, and for a myriad of good reasons. There was a smaller population to carry, higher attrition rates, more and deadlier wars, and many other factors.

Also, ffs, it's called resource crunch and wealth centralization, and I'm not entirely convinced we aren't staring down the smoldering barrel of some serious shit Stateside over the next decade.

Be the change you want to see.

Have 12 children in homelessness and prove to us that it is a better way to live life.

If you want it for others but not for yourself, you are just being hypocritical.

Well, you might think that is an acceptable standard of living. I don't.

Great counter argument to GP:

> this is the point where I point out homelessness was the normal standard of living for most of humanities evolutionary history.

Oh wait, that was you.

Yeah. I can repeat the same point a 3rd time if you think that will help? I haven't changed my mind.

I can repeat myself ad eternum too.

If you think it is acceptable to be homeless with plenty of children because evolution, you should do it yourself. Be the change you want to see.

Since I have little interest in keeping up this cycle with someone that is incidentally (or worse, purposefully) too dense to understand basic contradictions, I'll leave you to have the last word.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Gotta say, I can understand one or two levels of commenting persisting in misreading something but this level of commitment to it has me confused.

1) I never said that it was acceptable to be homeless with lots of children. (1a) You've tried and failed to find a quote where I did, so I know you've read what I wrote and can't source that belief to anything I actually said; even stripped of context.

2) Misreading a comment is something that happens, so y'know, ok no worries maybe I wrote an unclear one. But I've explicitly told you I don't believe that. And it is a crazy belief that nobody holds so I don't know why it would be a hard thing to accept after a few clarifying words.

3) Third time a charm. In the article we've got a 100-word abstract that lays the position out nice and clearly. The major factor here is not house prices, it is changing - shifting if you will - priorities. We've had situations where house prices were absurdly high in the past - for most of our evolutionary history a house has been an unattainable luxury and fertility was off the charts by modern standards. High house prices are obviously not a root cause.

you two people are not speaking the same language. it's kinda hilarious.

> we had a substantial period of our evolutionary history where owning a house wasn't an option because houses didn't exist.

The population density at the time was much, much, much lower than it is now.

Exactly. We have a historical fertility rate that's much higher to go with our historical early fatality rare, which was much higher. Population grew gradually from the development of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution, being basically starvation-limited or disease-limited along the way, and then exploded.

I suggest taking a closer look at section 5 ("V. Shifting Priorities and Social Influences"), which starts on page 24 for alternative explanations.

The preceding section does mention studies that show a cause and effect relationship between e.g., income and fertility, but the effect is surprisingly small. The authors conclude the section with:

> “Pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”

Sadly I think you’re on the money here, especially for Australia and Canada

The threat of being evicted every 12 months in Melbourne has reduced me to not being able to plan much at all. Rental market is cooked. It's exhausting.

While I don’t disagree that houses have become less affordable, that graph is rather misleading. A graph of the ratio, as posted in one of the comments [0], would be more informative.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/e1jrvw/com...

Israel has arguably the worst income to house price ratio in the OECD at 160 monthly wages (~13 annual salaries) which is more than twice the US at 68 but they have also the highest TFR in the developed world even when you exclude the Orthodox Jews…

So it’s not as simple as housing is not affordable… it does feel like it’s very much cultural/social I can more than afford to have children but I’m at almost 40 and I don’t. And speaking from the pool of a rented villa in Greece I got on whim for 2 weeks because I got annoyed at work I can’t even begin to think about having them…

The point of the paper is that that graph is irrelevant

They looked at economic influence and found it does not account for the drop in child birth

Did they even attempt to scale it against housing prices?

Yes, part III section C is all about the effect of house prices on fertility. There's certainly an effect, but previous studies have shown that housing costs can only account for a small share of the drop in fertility.

Ah, the subreddit where all data is made up and the discussion is irrelevant