In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in freefall, according to a new analysis of census data by a policy analyst at the Economic Innovation Group (EIPG) from 2020 to 2023.
00:00:00.000Hello everyone! Today we are going to be talking about an interesting phenomenon that I was aware was happening but I wasn't aware how severe it was and it is chilling when you go to the stats and here we are talking about the mass and very recent mass exodus of families and children from major American cities.
00:00:22.220They are just disappearing. For this I will be looking at an article in The Atlantic called The Urban Family Exodus is a Warning for Progressives.
00:00:33.260So of course the piece starts with the writer bemoaning J.D. Vance as the worst human being in the world and trumpets as all monsters because they must in their performative schlicking.
00:00:47.740I love this as always whenever they're the pro-natalist piece. They must start by saying how horrible we all are and then they go to, but they may have a point.
00:00:58.520But at the risk of giving Vance any credit here, I must admit that progressives do have a family problem.
00:01:05.620The problem doesn't exist at the level of individual choice where conservative scolds tend to fixate.
00:01:10.660Rather, it exists at the level of urban family policy. American families with young children are leaving big urban counties in droves.
00:01:19.400And that says something interesting about the state of mobility and damning about the state of American cities and the progressives who govern them.
00:01:27.820First, the facts. In large urban metros, the number of children under five years old is in freefall, according to a new analysis of census data by Conan O'Brien, a policy...
00:01:46.700At the Think Tank Economic Innovation Group from 2020 to 2023.
00:01:52.220So in three years, the number of these kids declined by nearly 20% in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queen, and the Bronx.
00:02:00.580They also fell by double-digit percentage points in counties making up most or all of Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
00:02:12.640If you do not understand how huge that is, imagine if some other population declined by 20% in Manhattan over the course of three years.
00:02:25.320Imagine if, like, the number of black people in Manhattan declined by 20% over three years.
00:02:53.040This exodus is not merely the result of past COVID waves.
00:02:55.940Yes, the pace of the urban exodus was fastest during the high pandemic years of 2020 and 2021.
00:03:00.660But even at the slower rate of out-migration since then, several counties, including those encompassing Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco,
00:03:10.360are on pace to lose 50% of their under-5 population in 20 years.
00:03:19.740To be clear, demographics have complex feedback loops and counter-feedback loops.
00:03:23.720The toddler population of these places won't necessarily have by the 2040s.
00:03:29.980But we all know it will, so let's be honest here.
00:03:33.300Nor is this exodus merely the result of declining nationwide birth rates.
00:03:37.120Yes, women across the country are having fewer children than they used to.
00:03:40.860The share of women under 40 who have never given birth doubled from the early 1980s to the 2020s.
00:03:47.940But the under-5 population is still declining twice as fast in large urban counties as it is elsewhere, according to O'Brien's censor analysis.
00:03:56.320So what's the matter with Manhattan, L.A., and Chicago?
00:04:01.260After the Great Recession, during a period of low urban crime, young college-educated people flocked to downtown areas to advance their career.
00:04:10.220Retail upscaled and housing costs increased.
00:04:13.940In 2019, the economist Jed Coloco showed that in cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.,
00:04:21.060young, high-income, college-educated whites were moving in, and multiracial families with children were moving out.
00:04:28.160The coronavirus pandemic, which resulted in school closures and loosened the tether between home and office, pushed even more families to flee.
00:04:37.640Now, I want to note that they are playing a little shell game here.
00:04:41.560Because I would put these statistics out on the screen right here.
00:04:46.400Multiracial people as an ethnic group have the lowest fertility rate of any ethnic group in the U.S., well below whites.
00:05:03.720And also, as I mentioned in that episode, of all ethnic groups in the U.S., other than inter-ethnic groups, blacks have the second lowest fertility rate.
00:05:12.160If you are only looking at blacks not in the bottom 30% of income.
00:05:17.320If you're looking at blacks in the bottom 30% of income, it brings the black fertility rate in line with other fertility rates.
00:05:23.040But blacks actually have a devastatingly low fertility when they're not in just objective poverty.
00:05:38.480When the population of young kids in a city falls to 10 or 20% in just a few years, that's a potential political earthquake.
00:05:46.060Almost overnight, there are fewer parents around to fight for better schools, local playgrounds, or all the other mundane amenities families care about.
00:05:56.140As Yale sociologist Nicholas Chetensky has shown, if you have a friend who smokes or exercises, it significantly increases the odds that you will do the same.
00:06:03.880The same principle might hold for having or not having kids.
00:06:06.460Actually, studies have shown very, I don't know how he's not familiar with these studies, but okay, whatever.
00:06:10.560As young children become scarce in big cities, people in their 20s and 30s who are thinking about having children will have fewer opportunities to see firsthand how fulfilling parenthood can be.
00:06:20.180What they're left with instead are media representations, which tend to be inflected by the negativity bias of news.
00:06:28.860At a glance, these trends might not seem like they have anything to do with contemporary progressivism, but they do.
00:06:33.700America's richest cities are profoundly left-leaning, and many of them, including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, are themselves in cons in left-leaning states.
00:06:43.640The places ought to be advertisements for what modern progressive movement can achieve without the meddlesome conservatism getting in the way.
00:06:51.440At the local or state level, if progressives want to sell their cause to the masses, they should be able to say, elect us, and we'll make America more like Oakland, or Brooklyn, or suburban Detroit.
00:07:03.900If they can't make that argument, that's a problem.
00:07:06.720Right now, it's hard to make that argument because urban progressivism is afflicted by an inability to build.
00:07:14.760Cities in red states are building much more housing than blue states, blah, blah, blah, and they're going NIMBY here.
00:07:19.960But the point being is, and just so you know, it is Democrats that are keeping this building stuff from going up.
00:07:24.820It's due to the way the corrupt unions influence Democratic politicians to ensure that building costs in the U.S. are much more expensive in cities than they are even in the EU.
00:07:49.680I ask, like, how I know so much about the world in terms of, like, contemporary international politics.
00:07:55.940VisualPolitik is probably the best educational research or contemporary political events that exist in the world today by a significant margin.
00:08:06.340After them, Peter Zeihan is the next best resource.
00:08:09.780Some people dismiss him as a CIA asset, quote unquote, and I would really push back on this notion.
00:08:16.780That's not to say that he isn't obviously tied very closely to the American military industrial complex, and he doesn't have very strong motivations to promote their interests.
00:08:27.860But he is the first geopolitical analyst that any of the mainstream listen to that recognize the huge potential impact of fertility collapse.
00:08:36.240And he has made a number of very, very correct calls over the ages, and he's generally been right about most of the calls that he's made.
00:08:46.940So when an individual comes to me and they're like, oh, don't trust this guy because he has these preset interests, I'm like, well, that may be true, but he's sort of batting 100 right now.
00:08:57.100So when somebody with no geopolitical contacts and who has made no accurate predictions about future geopolitical events comes to me and says, don't trust this guy who has tons of geopolitical contacts because he has tons of geopolitical contacts and who has made tons of accurate predictions about the geopolitical scene and how it's going to play out.
00:09:19.460Also, I just love how wholesome Peter Zaihan is, just like doing his podcasts while on hikes, a little bit winded, you know, so he's really trying to exert himself.
00:10:30.760But they're still in my, I will do and always stand them bucket.
00:10:34.260The one downside of this, of course, being that individuals might be able to triangulate who our friends are from the individuals who we always stand no matter what, even when it may not make perfect sense why we're standing them.
00:10:52.720But anyway, so they basically show in that particular video how progressive politics in the United States has made it impossible to build in the major cities.
00:11:02.680However, I think if you're saying, oh, the problem is we're not building enough housing in major cities and that's why people aren't having kids.
00:11:09.380I think, you know, you're missing the forest for the trees.
00:11:11.600As an example of this, a lot of people, when they complain about, oh, low fertility rates are totally a factor of small living spaces or cost of housing, I would point out that in Israel over the past decade, home prices have increased by 345% and are unusually high on a global scale.
00:11:31.300And this has actually been driven primarily by government policy, specifically regulations and inefficient land use.
00:11:38.200And yet Israel has sky-high fertility rates.
00:11:41.180I do think he makes a point that if progressives can't go to conservatives and be like, in the areas where we dominate, we have fixed the problems that you don't have.
00:11:49.340Because it's clear, I think, to anyone who has lived in a progressive and a conservative district, as we have know, life is, like, objectively better in conservative districts.
00:11:59.160Like, there's more stores, it's cheaper, the police are better, the fire people are better, the infrastructure is better.
00:12:07.760The, it's, it's, it's, it's humbling, it's humbling, just to also, even just to see the experience that our son is getting in kindergarten, because we're sitting, we're letting him go to public school as kindergarten, because he asked.
00:12:21.800We don't consider it his education, it's a supplement to homeschooling that he, like, you know, we'd consider, like, soccer.
00:12:27.700But, man, the resources he gets, the treatment he gets, it's incredible.
00:12:35.660And this was not the case, so my, my brother and his wife made an exodus from LA, where they were based.
00:12:42.480And they've just been like, oh my God, like, it is so much better out here in, in rural Pennsylvania than it was in LA.
00:12:48.280In every respect, and I think this is something where you, you really didn't want to move to a rural area when I first suggested it to you, when you were treating it as a massive concession.
00:12:59.400I remember when we were first talking about this, you're like, yeah, but there's so many things to do in the city, and there's so many, like, what are we going to do?
00:13:07.080And I can walk everywhere, blah, blah, blah.
00:13:09.180Yeah, walk everywhere, like, we could walk to the grocery store, and then what ends up happening, right, is you realize, I remember, like, when you realize, you're like, wait, we were walking to a grocery store 30 minutes and carrying our bags back home, and we are driving two and a half minutes to a grocery store here, filling our trunk and driving it back home, that it is infinitely more convenient.
00:13:34.300Or it's like, yeah, but you won't have as much to do.
00:13:37.620I'm sorry, I get to take my kids to the myriad of festivals, which are happening constantly around us.
00:13:44.880I get to take them to pick pumpkins, I get to take them to pick wildflowers at the wildflower picking areas, I get to take them to pet bunny rabbits, I get to take them to, like, it is so, so, so much to do that is so much, like, nicer and more wholesome than the things I was doing in the city before.
00:14:04.300And, and what do I want from city with a kid? Like, what are they offering kids? Nothing.
00:14:09.860And then it's like, oh, but they have a few nice museums. And it's like, yeah, maybe, but they're not harder to get to from exurban areas than they are from the cities.
00:14:20.360So for example, we went to Philadelphia this weekend to go to the Franklin Institute, and it was a 30 minute drive.
00:14:27.000If I had gone from the city, what would it have been a 20 minute drive?
00:14:30.620Like, this is the thing with cities, especially the major cities like San Francisco that people miss, is you're not actually that much closer to other stuff in cities, because the infrastructure of cities is so poorly designed.
00:14:40.180And when we also thought that living in a city, or sorry, living in the suburbs would isolate us from friends, when it turns out that we actually socialize more and more efficiently as people who live outside the city.
00:14:53.340And that's not because people come to us because no one wants, no one's here. No one's even really in Philadelphia. We go out to New York, we go out to DC. But what we do, and we're just about to do this, is we will host happy hours or cocktail parties, two nights in a row while staying at a nice place.
00:15:12.900And just invite everyone we know in that city to come out. And a decent number of people show up.
00:15:21.520Yeah. And like, if you're in town, everyone's like, well, maybe I'll just see you later. You're here. I'm here. We'll see each other eventually. And it never happens. And we socialized very, very little when we lived in cities. Now that we're outside, we're very systematic about it. We don't waste our time. And when we do it, we do it really well. It's nice. So yeah, it's not what you would expect, I guess.
00:15:42.580I was very surprised by our move to the suburbs. They're much more prenatal, for sure.
00:15:47.620Well, and people like Marberthes on Twitter constantly make this argument that, I mean, he likes to argue, I think, that there's just not enough physical space in apartment sensitivities that people are too.
00:15:59.540But hold on, I'll argue more than this. I don't just think it's living in a rural area. So that was one thing to change. But you have lived in more conservative and less conservative cities. So you've lived in San Francisco and Dallas.
00:16:10.600What is the quality of life like between those two cities?
00:16:16.460You grew up, I grew up in Dallas. My family's in local politics in Dallas. So my opinion of Dallas doesn't count. What is your perspective as somebody who visited? I remember the first time you visited and you're like, where are the homeless people?
00:16:29.020Yeah, it's too hot for them. Although now there are homeless people in Dallas. But before, yeah, they're just not that many. I mean, you say it's too hot for them, but it's not that it's that they don't offer services for them.
00:16:41.480Yeah, there's just not that much of an incentive.
00:16:44.260San Francisco recently had a policy to convert luxury high rises to homeless apartments that are given to them for free.
00:16:51.840New York has a policy where they rent out rooms in a hotel room, sometimes luxury hotel rooms for homeless people, rather than letting them sleep on the streets.
00:17:07.080That's why they're not in Dallas, because they're not putting them up in luxury hotels. And Dallas has Democratic politicians running it. They're just wackadoos, like the ultra-progressives of the East Coast.
00:17:22.180Yeah, I mean, I don't know what to say. It is very different. Yeah, and even the social scene, I thought, would be worse in Dallas. And it wasn't.
00:18:02.800We're genuinely progressive people. And I think that's the other really big thing, is that progressives are more interesting and fun in conservative or centrist cities because they're real, and they're not just-
00:18:13.920Yeah, and let's talk about, I'm sorry, I think you actually make a great argument there, right?
00:18:18.240Like, if you go to a- And Dallas is a Democrat city. Like, it is a solid blue city. One of my cousins recently ran for Congress in Dallas, and she ran as a Republican, and it was just like, she had no shot. She had no shot.
00:18:31.420My granddad with a congressman there, who was Republican, but, like, it's not anymore.
00:20:13.640I mean, Dallas has, quote-unquote, like, downtown is a dangerous part of Dallas, and I've never actually felt in danger in downtown Dallas.
00:20:20.780I have been to Austin, like, three times recently, and I have felt in mortal danger every one of those times.
00:20:40.880Like, when I learned something else, for people who are watching this from Dallas, because I didn't know this when I was interviewing my dad, but apparently it was him.
00:20:47.880He's the reason why the underground tunnels that connect the center of the city do air conditioning stuff.
00:20:52.040He was on the, or, like, started the community.
00:21:26.440And I think it's all downstream, and we talked about this in another episode, this rehabilitate rather than prosecute mindset.
00:21:32.220Which is to say that when people are bad actors in a city environment, the progressive mindset is we can fix them, and it's probably our fault that they're bad actors.
00:21:44.000Whereas the more conservative mindset is to say-
00:21:58.060And worse, victimize innocent people, which is what we see in places like Austin.
00:22:03.560All of these signs that say things like keep Austin weird and stuff like that, you can be weird and still have a degree of ruthlessness to the way that you treat individual people.
00:22:20.440When people say keep Austin weird, I'm weird.
00:22:24.080Oh no, now that, now that, but like since Tim Walsh started the whole weird as like an accusation against conservatives, does Austin have to, and does Portland have to drop the whole, like do they have to drop weird?