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Sure, you’ve noticed something pretty important about PMC fertility.
As a single person, you can live a “Yuppie” lifestyle in a big city on $120-150k a year. As a couple, you can live it on $200-$250k a year, which is even cheaper per-head.
As parents of 3 children, that same lifestyle goes from costing $200-250k a year to costing maybe $900,000 a year. You want to live in the same part of Manhattan? Your rent goes from $4k a month to $12k. Your kids cost $140k a year (post tax) to educate. Your summer trip to Europe goes from costing $10k to $40k, when you factor in needing three hotel rooms, 5 business class seats instead of 2 etc. You need a nanny, if both parents want to keep working which they usually need to. You need a housekeeper (not the same). You need to save for their college tuition, which will be insanely expensive.
Of course, nobody actually needs these things. Our couple who make $250k a year (by regular American standards a great household income) could move to the burbs, or perhaps to an MCOL state, buy a spacious McMansion, send their kids to a nice, safe, middle class public high school with good teachers. They could go skiing on the East Coast instead of to Aspen. They could go to a nice middle class resort in the US for a week in Summer instead of to Santorini or Positano for the IG slideshow. They could even spend two weeks in Europe if they were willing to fly economy and stay in a hotel that wasn’t five star. The likelihood is they would be no less happy.
But of course, they want to appear richer than they are, which is why they did all those things in the first place. And the number of jobs paying $900k (or even $450k) is in much shorter supply than the number paying $150k. So there we are. The people in this bracket who have many kids are the people so rich (either from working in one of the few jobs that pay this much, or having family money) they can live the lifestyle with kids, or the people who are willing to sacrifice the whole thing.
So how much of the red state fertility advantage do you think comes from the attitude that public schools are fine, actually, as long as they’re not in the ghetto, and public colleges are where normal people go(private schools are for oddballs or the genuinely highly exceptional)?
I think a lot of it, combined with cheaper housing like 2rafa said. The problem that afflicts the PMC is they value living an urban and high-status lifestyle over having children, and act accordingly. When they do have children, they stress them out pushing them to become petit elites through prestigious education, so they too can afford a shoebox apartment in Manhattan.
The other problem is a lot of the interesting careers for smart people require geographical clustering in urban areas — and more upper-middle-class people are interested in those careers. Work-from-home was a big plus for people whose main problem was this; it enabled people who were trained in a professional field to work in an area with red-tribe property values. A ton of the COVID-era population shift came down to WFH making it an option for moderate professionals to move from blue tribe areas to red tribe areas.
I’m critical of the impact of WFH on productivity, but I think some element of professional geographic distribution would be the greatest thing that could ever be done to get the PMC to consider having more children.
The really interesting thing about this is that the PMC lifestyle in Manhattan looks like poverty to rednecks with three kids- it's a shoebox apartment, after all. Public transportation might be nice if it was clean, orderly, and safe, but the subway is... not that. Materially, the people in a trailerpark outconsume them.
Agreed.
That being said, I think there’s a lot to say for an urban lifestyle — if, as you’ve said, it’s safe, clean, and accessible. My view is that our biggest problem is our country has so many great and historic cities, but we’ve allowed inner-city crime to absolutely gut and destroy them, so any and all who want that kind of life have to fight over the scraps that aren’t totally ruined. We’ve allowed the bad optics of arresting and detaining criminals and gangsters who happen to be black men to absolutely ruin the possibility of city people to live good lives in many places, which is a very sad way in which the Democratic coalition is at odds with itself. And meanwhile Republicans are just living their best lives out in the burbs or the country.
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I think cheaper housing is almost certainly part of it, and that likely is too.
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