Right, and if you’re in the US and alive today, you will never see the end of cheap labor. Even as globalization winds down, the US’ relationship with Mexico will ensure that.
Population only grew due to immigration. This can quickly get ugly. Lack of workers leading to wage inflation. While demand could shrink leading to less buying
True. What’s encouraging is that demand kept up the entire duration of the trade war and over the last year as consumer prices soared to cover the cost of hiring back almost 10,000,000 laid off workers.
2021 saw a huge drop in immigration according to census data as well. You are correct that immigration was a large factor why the population grew overall.
Some are predicting a mini-baby boom in the U.S. in coming months (Forbes calls it a Baby Blip) probably related to people delaying having a child during the pandemic.[1]
Also, immigrants tend to have more babies than do assimilated native-born Americans, as is also true in Europe. A direct result of the recent couple of decades of immigration would be a lot of larger families among immigrants, offsetting the trend toward smaller families or childlessness among native born white Americans (the least or 2nd least fertile subset of the population -- Asian Americans have lower overall birth rates).[2][3][4]
I predict we're not gonna see anything resembling a baby boom until/unless we fix healthcare. It's too expensive, otherwise. Might need subsidized or free child care, too, before it's even slightly likely. You burn $100k surprisingly fast with even a healthy kid and without splurging a bit (pre-natal care and birth, increased insurance costs afterward, child care or lost wages due to one parent staying home, et c). Throw in our mediocre public pension system and the death of significant retirement benefits at most jobs that used to have them, and if you're having a kid these days and don't make excellent money you're signing up for an unpleasant retirement. Out-of-control housing costs and the current inflation levels just make that deal even less appealing.
People who live with or near their parents have a lot more support in terms of child care, ability to go back to work, help with chores (buying/changing diapers etc.).
Regarding the question of retirement... my wife and I have raised one kid, who is now 17. We're all on my company's group plan. I haven't seen the kind of expenses you are alluding to. However, university tuition is looming, and that WILL be expensive. Luckily, we have a 429 plan, which after 17 years has grown to be a decent sum.
The flip side of retirement is that children provide the parents with support in their old age. My mom, who just turned 95, has near constant attention from my sister who lives nearby. Many others I know are in the same boat - one or more children become their health advocates and protect them, and in some cases support them. Children, in my view, are a net asset, not a liability.
> People who live with or near their parents have a lot more support in terms of child care, ability to go back to work, help with chores (buying/changing diapers etc.).
Definitely, but lack of mobility comes with its own (monetary and other) costs, in the modern economy especially.
> We're all on my company's group plan. I haven't seen the kind of expenses you are alluding to.
With most employers, adding your kid(s) to insurance most likely runs a few hundred dollars a month (over what you'd be paying otherwise) in premiums, and for the vast majority of people that'll still come with a large (high-four- or low-five-figures) max-out-of-pocket if something actually goes wrong with any of you. I expect spending ~$25,000 on medical expenses (including the birth and prenatal care, and cost of adding the kid to insurance) by the time a kid's 5 is fairly normal, even if the kid's fairly healthy (it can get so much worse than that if they're not), and that's just one expense. That figure's certainly in line with what I've seen for various friends who've started families in the last few years, ranging from very blue-collar up to other software developers.
There are employers who provide way better (very low max-out-of-pocket) insurance and cover most or all of the premium, even for family plans. Most people aren't employed by those employers, though.
I live in a city with, I gather, remarkably cheap child care. You're still looking at about $8,000/yr/kid if you don't mind a daycare that's not particularly good. If one partner stays home instead, the cost is much higher, even assuming pretty minimal earning potential. We do have family nearby, luckily, and we lean on them for help with child care all the time, but not for dedicated 5-days-a-week 48ish-weeks-a-year care. I'm sure some people get full-time care from family members who'd not otherwise be working, so it's basically free, but I doubt it's the norm.
Admittedly, the worst expenses are front-loaded. Lost income or childcare costs drop a lot when kids start going to school. The initial birth is gonna hit whatever your max-out-of-pocket is with your insurance, which is usually gonna be several thousand, but that's a one-time cost. Unfortunately, a dollar invested the day your kid is born is also worth a lot more than $1 by the time they leave the house, so the fact that it's front loaded isn't exactly a good thing, as far as retirement savings goes.
The issue isn’t simply having a kid. A sustainable replacement rate means ~20+% of people need to have 3 kids which is far more difficult. That’s not such an issue right now, but with most developed countries having negative replacement rates it’s likely to become one.
I think most of this trend is happening in small counties.
Lots of people are moving to big cities, immigration means that the population is still growing very slowly.
Even if all these small counties emptied out, I don't think many people would want to live in them, you can already snap up housing there at a bargain price.
>Even if all these small counties emptied out, I don't think many people would want to live in them, you can already snap up housing there at a bargain price.
It's only a bargain when you're looking at it from the perspective of someone making stupid money doing tech or high finance in a big city.
My assumption is that instead of moving to the biggest cities in the us, people are spreading out amongst the smaller cities, not the myriad of tiny counties in the US.
"But the 10 fastest growing counties last year accounted for nearly 80 percent of the national total, a testament not so much to the rapid pace of change in these places, but to the lack of significant growth in the rest of the nation."
I believe the number was intended to be cumulative, not per city. In any case, the Census has only released county and state 2021 population estimates, not "places" i.e. cities. So we don't yet have a shared objective basis to discuss urban center vs. metro trends.
declining fertility rate seems to be a universal characteristic of economic development.
The elimination of poverty requires universal provision of education, women get educated, have less (no kids), birth rate drops and keeps dropping below the threshold of population stability.
I don't think there is any example of a society that has managed to reverse this trend. Maybe Ceaucescu Romania which at one point banned contraception and abortion, leading of course to the orphan crisis of the 1980's. Counter intuitively, devastating wars / famine also lead to post-crisis population boom, perhaps because education / career are entirely disrupted.
We probably need to think seriously about making people outside of the natural womb, can't see another way to reverse this trend outside of the above mentioned measures / circumstances
1) immigration - of course Israel grants the right of every Jewish person to live in Israel, in fact paid an incentive to relocate. Presumably there a constant inflow from the Jewish diaspora and their descendants which might supplement the population
2) orthodox families, I'm guessing, have outsized families. Where women do not participate in the market economy, they end up having lots of kids instead
Again, no idea on the percentage contributions of either of these cases, but it might go some way toward explaining Israel's countervailing trend!
Well the boat won't be able to go anywhere if an increasing number of the occupants refuse paddle. Also, gentle reminder that more Jews live in the US than in Israel.
I mean I'm not a huge fan of Israel due to their history, but to say that the religious scholar class in Israel does no productive work is strange. Just because they don't make anything you can sell for a profit, doesn't mean they don't add very real value to people's lives
I encountered (but did not shake hands with! ;) a lot of conservative women with 5+ kids in the workforce while in Israel. Much more than men, where I encountered less strict observance. It was a pretty interesting culture difference.
They were in education jobs until Covid, and now they’re in commerce jobs, but they’re obviously not productive members of society because of their religion?!?
Again over half of Haredi men choose to live off state handouts. Their women are anyways treated as second class citizens. If this remains the case, with their increasing numbers they will need more handouts which paid for by the rest of the population. It's not hard to see why this isn't sustainable.
TFR amongst secular Jewish women in Israel is 2.5. That's comfortably above the replacement level.
no, they're not productive because they live off of goverment handouts. ANYBODY who takes more than they give is unproductive. Middleschoolers are unproductive, incarcerated felons are unproductive, people living off government grants are unproductive
Israel has a large and growing ultra-Orthodox population, with an average of 7.1 children per woman among the ultra-Orthodox Jews: https://en.idi.org.il/articles/25385
The US has a similar fertility-focused religious movement, but it's much more fringe and relatively smaller. Religious beliefs can drive super-high birth rates in pretty much any society, but aside from Israel, higher education has been associated with lower rates of religious belief. Declining religious participation and intensity of belief may well be contributing to the fall in global birth-rates.
People are quick suggesting it is Orthodox, but in reality non-religious women in Israel have a fertility rate of 2.5, and overall contribution mounts over time as generations pass.
Serious question: Why do we need population numbers to be stable? Declining doesn't mean extinction. 8 billion people are doing a lot of damage to this planet that wasn't being done when we had 1 billion. A lot of people have publicly said they won't bring a child in a world that is dying.
extinction is indeed the risk. Population collapse is slow decline, steep fall, then exponential decrease. Agree with you on danger to the carrying capacity of the earth, but moderating population size seems instead to set an irreversible trend
> Population collapse is slow decline, steep fall, then exponential decrease.
You make it sound like this progression is inevitable like every slow decline is followed by a steep fall and then finally exponential bust which seems not very convincing.
Funny thing is impacts of austerity often constrains economic growth. People have their reasons for or against economic growth so it’s not an unadorned good. Someone like me with retirement savings wants economic growth so I support pro-natal and pro- immigration policy.
Less births -> less potential workers -> less workers -> less growth. Less growth is the one thing that sets almost every government off, be it micro- or macroeconomic.
It also creates friction politically, as the burden on the working populace increases due to a shift in working/non-working and almost no one wants to change for the worse. See the young vs the elderly and retirement ages, where the elderly will often vote for the young to carry the burden, and vice versa.
Long story short, it creates a situation where things have to change fundamentally or someone has to bite through the sour apple. Governments don't want to do either of these things.
This, then, just sounds to me like a great thing: to put pressure on changing things dramatically, through ultimately an existential crisis.
What, really, is humanity doing? What is the point? The idea that our existence itself is ultimately grounded in economic growth feels pretty thin; I imagine it is to even the staunchest capitalists on any reflection.
There to me, is something ultimately embarrassing about this "problem". Its kinda like we invested a lot of time and resources to throw a party, and when only a few people show up, we start to diagnose what's wrong with those people that didn't come, and never once consider that it was a shitty party.
I'm not sure it's quite universal, and I'm not quite sure it's related to women being educated.
From where I sit, the relative cost of kids goes up. In major cities:
- Kids are expected to have their own bedrooms
- The cost of a 3-bedroom apartment is beyond the means of most families of child-bearing age
- For most people, life is debt-driven. Mortgage. Credit card. College. Etc.
- Work is out-of-the-house, so kids need child care, which is a major expense. With schools, kids still need child care after school. This is different from kids hanging out on a farm.
I'd like a big family, but I can't afford a big family. Ironically, my (poor) ancestors could.
A lot of this has to do with issues like zoning and building codes as well. Homes are /expensive/ to build in the US.
Child care 0-5 is like a second mortgage. I paid more for one kid than I did for mortgage- in Seattle of all places. If you have 2 it’s like having 3 houses. That’s not affordable or sustainable in Major cities
Same here. My nanny makes more than I did at my first job out of college as an electrical engineer (wasn't long enough ago for inflation to have that large of an impact either). Childcare is our highest monthly expense, more so than housing (mortgage). I consider myself fairly fortunate, I don't know how other people do it. Once the kids are both in full time school, that same monthly budget will have to be diverted to college savings too, so it's not like it's even a temporary thing (if you want your children to get an education and not be saddled with lifelong debt, that is).
Poor ancestors with no contraception had high child mortality. Pretty often, because they could not afford those kids. The conditions in which those kids lived would made you target of CPS pretty often and actually for very good reasons.
In industrialization, we are talking about 4 years old spending whole day alone in the streets, while BOTH parents work 12 hours a day in factory. We are talking about kids that are small, because they dont eat enough. We are talking about 11 years old working in factories or selling newspapers for 10 hours a day, falling asleep on stairs due to being tired and expected to earn money for themselves and younger siblings.
It’s worth pointing out that in a lot of countries, there’s also an inverse relationship between household income and fertility rate. Often those positioned to afford more kids choose not too. Similarly, even countries with extremely generous maternal benefits don’t see significant boosts in their fertility.
> A lot of this has to do with issues like zoning and building codes as well.
The general trend of richer countries having fewer babies holds even in countries with wildly different zoning laws and expectations around living conditions. Japan’s fertility rate fell below replacement a long time ago, and even countries like India and Mexico are now at or below replacement levels.
For any given material explanation one can point to, there are clear counterexamples of countries without that material problem which still has a low fertility rate.
I'm not so sure. I think it's a mistake to look at this on a country-wide basis:
- The cost-of-living in India in Bangalore or Mumbai -- at a standard to afford a family -- is astronomical for relatively educated individuals making $10k/year. That's where affluent people live. It's not until you get into the real elites making $100k/year that it's easy again. That's the same worldwide. Even very poor countries have areas where these dynamics kick in.
- Where many poor people live, for example, on rural farms, it's possible to have lots of kids.
"Generous maternal benefits" don't come anywhere close to filling this gap.
> "Generous maternal benefits" don't come anywhere close to filling this gap.
You would expect some effect though, yet Northern Europe and Japan continue to have extremely low birth rates despite the efforts of their governments.
Also, many European countries saw fertility rates drop a long time ago, often back when housing was much, much cheaper. IIRC countries like Sweden and Norway dropped below replacement levels in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I don't know Sweden and Norway well enough to comment. From my experience in other parts of Europe, the situation was more complex.
In countries I've been in, that period coincided with a move from farms, where land was ample, to cities, which were cramped. Big family housing wasn't really available; those cities had apartments which simply didn't really support larger families. Cost wasn't so much an issue for having a cramped 2 or 3 bedroom in the sixties, but beyond that, you moved into ultra-wealthy territory.
So I guess my question is whether you could write a little bit more about the Scandinavian countries. That's my own ignorance speaking.
Japanese cities are super-cramped. I would not want a big family in Tokyo.
Up to a few adjustment factors, you'd expect the average nanny to cost the same as the average woman's salary, unless nannies have large economies of scale.
Those adjustment factors would be things like -- what percentage of women have children, how many children do they have, how many children does the average nanny care for...
We could work through the various supply and demand factors, but, basically, whether compensated formally or not, if you hold the fertility rate fixed, then you also hold the amount-of-childcare fixed. There's some kind of conservation rule at work.
You can make the model a little bigger by including all the raising-of-children in those countries that are net exporters of people. Which there will be fewer and fewer of.
Georgia and Israel. In Georgia's case, in 2007 the patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church offered to personally baptize and become the godfather to every third, fourth, fifth, etc. child born to married Georgian Orthodox couples. Birth rates subsequently went from ~1.5 to ~2.1, and have remained above replacement since then.
Worldwide, religiosity is increasing despite declines in the west because of birth rates in Africa and Latin America and robust growth of Christianity in China: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/27/religion-why-is.... There are now more Christians in China than there are people in Germany and Spain combined.
There's a reason these major religions have lasted thousands of years, making the history of a country like America look short in comparison. Say what you will about them, but they obviously have value in that many of the most prosperous civilizations in the world today came from these traditions and still follow their general moral guidelines.
If a society wants to fix a population decline so badly, it should make having and raising children free or as low-cost as possible. I suspect most people avoid having kids due to the economic impact of their own lives, which shows that the wider society could really give a damn.
Each of my children have required some extra medical attention. As well as my wife's pregnancies. Total cost per child hovers around $100k so far.
But obviously no one can pay that so either it's insurance or it goes to collections. In my case it's insurance. Only I've got a high deductible plan. 5k deductible. And because pregnancies go 9 months there's a chance that any given pregnancy costs 10k.
Meanwhile I asked my mom how much her pregnancies cost (all three c sections). Apparently insurance basically picked up all costs such that only trivial amounts were left over.
We've been extremely lucky to have ways to afford our children's births so far. Nothing we planned for just things that happened that saved us a ton of money. I honestly am not sure how most people handle this financially.
These lead to people postponing kids for years, so they all have them at the same time after. People in general don't want to have babies in high risk high danger situations.
> We probably need to think seriously about making people outside of the natural womb, can't see another way to reverse this trend outside of the above mentioned measures / circumstances
At this point, its pretty clear that naturally starting and carrying a developing fetus is not an issue. Its the cost of the child after its born that's the issue. Having a bunch of babies coming out of artificial wombs is a recipe for disaster if they have no parents.
Have you learned nothing from the single parent household pandemic? Single parent children have much worse life outcomes than dual parent households. Zero parents? I'd imagine that would be worse.
Yes, possibly dire consequences I agree. Two things not in a way of a rebuttal but to advance the dialogue
1) Artificial wombs ≠ no parents. Kids might just be handed over to folks who want to parent but don't want the pregnancy / birth.
2) Kids could be raised by the state. Has been done before, though generally as a form of military service, thinking specifically of the Ottoman devshirme system; granted they did abduction, but are a decent example of state managed child rearing
3) Maybe robots could do the parenting. Eventually they may be able to make a passable attempt at it. Reminded of the movie 'Mother' - a dystopia obviously but still...better than no be at all!
> We probably need to think seriously about making people outside of the natural womb, can't see another way to reverse this trend outside of the above mentioned measures / circumstances
Find a way to make the cost to parents zero over the lifetime of the kid for all the basics (child care, healthcare, food, clothing) and I bet rates shoot way up.
Having a kid is an extremely expensive luxury good right now. No wonder people are hesitant to do it.
though having a kid being a luxury good is likely a persistent condition regardless of how strong the welfare state is, unless you actually go to the point of paying women to have more children (something we should try btw). Right now the incentives are weak - cash bonus in some countries, some form of income support in others - all pretty small beer, not enough to make a difference!
I'm not sure this is all that shocking? The US birth rate is barely above replacement level and it's only select groups having kids plus immigrations that keeps the population growing.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if that grow was limited to 25% of counties (guessing major urban center or at least "corridors").
Will rural America see a population implosion, as boomers die? A relatively small number of young people stay in rural America after graduating high school and virtually none return after college.
This is just from my observation of central Illinois; I’m assuming it’s the same all over.
Yes, and then the ones who are left will complain about it. Some guy right here on HN was moaning about the state mandate that his unincorporated area build a few new houses. The town has a population of about 1000 people and the median age is 67. Sixty-seven years! Likely half those people will be dead in 10 years. If you have a community where you don't build housing, so all your young people are forced to move away, then that community will suddenly die.
Median age very dramatically even between rural counties. Many counties in the rural southwest have a median age less than 37, probably due to a large number of immigrants [1]. For example, much of California - rural or urban - is very young (Even if the wealth is concentrated in the hands of older people). It's the same for Western Texas.
So their fate with respect to population decline is probably different than rural parts of Central Illinois or rural parts of the East and Midwest.
* increasing productivity in farming with the destruction of small farms and increased economic inequalities
* crumbling infrastructure in rural areas, from closing supermarkets and schools to deficient roads and services
Except for Covid I don't think any of these trends will revert soon. Many of these counties have degraded so much that they might be uncapable of atracting remote workers.
Cost is the biggest one I can think of. If you didn't walk out of the hospital with a 8k bill (on a good delivery) and then have to figure out how to afford $1,500 per month childcare after 12 weeks unpaid leave, people would probably have a lot more kids.
Sorry, I meant "Wether this is because of human choice or something else is irrelevant to it being named Fertility Rate".
Of course you are right that the underlying reasons are all relevant depending on the question, but they are all covered under the umbrella of "fertility rate".
In conclusion I am (pedantically?) arguing the definition of the term Fertility Rate, not anything else.
In the post WWII era, it was common for Americans to raise two or three children on a single blue collar salary. That doesn't seem economically viable in recent decades.
> * crumbling infrastructure in rural areas, from closing supermarkets and schools to deficient roads and services
I expect many the shine of many of the "pandemic homesteader" stories we've seen will tarnish pretty quickly as a result of this. How much of a discount are you willing to accept on the cost of living at the expense of safe drinking water? Are you old enough to be concerned about reliable emergency services, or access to a hospital? You're not getting a bargain by living in a rural area, you're getting the market price.
In rural areas, safe drinking whatever is often up to you. You’ll have a well, and ideally you’ll get it inspected regularly. You should be able to control this, unless there is something fouling all the water in the immediate area. But many people never inspect their wells, and there are way too many pathogens in their water.
I agree up with well water, a septic field, and no sidewalks. Never doing that again. I want to be apart of human progress and have modern infrastructure. The septic field was probably the worst.
I agree. I didn’t want to go to in depth, but I imagine many people who grew up in the suburbs wouldn’t consider the quality of well water when looking at a rural home. How many would research nearby industry to see what might be polluting the groundwater? The mines and factories don’t put up signs saying “Our coal ash pond is leaking into the water table”. There is a lot of work in the modern world to minimize your exposure to environmental toxins and it’s not something we are taught or told we need to know.
I suppose it is something you just need to know. If you are looking at purchasing a home with a well have it inspected. Depending on where you live this may be a requirement for the sale of any home.
Safe drinking water is not really much of an issue in the United States outside of lead pipes in mostly urban areas. If you have a well you know to get it checked every few years. Sometimes it needs to be treated. If you are really concerned you run your drinking water through a water filter. I grew up on a well that was hundreds of years old and only about 15 feet deep. And it is still a good well to this day. Modern wells are hundreds of feet deep and are sealed. They are very safe.
Access to healthcare is an issue depending on the area. There is zero financial incentive for healthcare workers to be in poor rural America. Really, though, it is a poverty issue. Rural areas, particularly those that were built around a specific and now defunct industry, such as coal mining, have a lack of available jobs and they are now unwilling to leave a town that no longer has a purpose to exist.
> There is zero financial incentive for healthcare workers to be in poor rural America.
I've heard the opposite but it was all anecdotal. I heard surgeons and other doctors actually get paid a lot more to live in more rural areas because doctors generally don't want to live there so they have to do something to attract them.
It depends on the particular area and specialty. Surgeons are paid top dollar everywhere. Physicians aren't generally paid well outside of major hospital systems. And psychologists are still viewed suspiciously in many parts of the country.
As far as location is concerned, plenty of areas that are just 10 miles from a major metropolitan area are considered rural for census purposes. Owning a practice in a bucolic part of southern Connecticut is different from owning one in a Gold Rush ghost town. Population density is a still important, even if it matters less than it would for a major hospital system.
Not to mention there's the dating factor. While this may not be an issue for late-career/semi-retired doctors, the younger or divorced ones will face an ethical and professional dilemma regarding dating patients in a small town on top of the usual stressors in being a doctor.
I’m pretty sure by the time you’re done with your residency and are looking for long term employment - you’re in late 20s and early 30s as a doctor and are likely going to be very close to married or are married. Only issue will be if you’re married to another doctor and can’t find another position in that small town.
There are plenty of doctors that come out broken up, divorced, or single right out of medical school. Even though there's a high intra-occupational marriage rate among healthcare professionals, not everyone is in a position to benefit. If a freshly-minted doctor wants to have a chance at love outside of medical school, he/she would be in a better position in a big city than a small town.
There's an awful lot of ground between "unsafe drinking water" and "megacity".
Take Ault, Colorado, just for instance. Google says the population is 1,947. It declined from 2018 to 2019. (Not sure how Google knows that, when there wasn't a yearly census. Maybe better not to ask - Google's surveillance powers aren't the point here.)
Ault is this little small town. It's on a US highway. It's 17 minutes off of an interstate. It's 27 minutes to Fort Collins, a town of 100,000 people with a state university. It's 1:17 to Denver, a city of 4 million people.
So if you need a hospital, there's one 30 minutes away. If you absolutely need a big city hospital, it's an hour away. That's inconvenient, but you (hopefully) won't need it very often. Need an InstaCare type facility? There's probably one 20 minutes away, and almost certainly one 30 minutes away.
Need an appliance store? It's maybe 25 minutes away. Well, mine is 15 minutes away, and I'm in a big city.
Need a non-remote job? There's a fair amount of tech in Fort Collins. I've had worse commutes. (I didn't like them, but I've had them.)
So I'm not seeing the hard dichotomy between "big city" and "completely out in the sticks". It's a continuum.
Why wouldn't it be, simply, "The nation socially isolated in 2020, so less [bow-chicka-bow-bow] happened, so in 2021 there were lower-than-average births"?
(Certainly longer-standing trends will continue as trends, but... the "75%" stat seems like it'd point to covid isolation to me.)
Well, at least one source[1] suggests that sexlessness for men was actually dropping during the pandemic, breaking a quite significant trend. Meanwhile, it was rising for women. Seems there is at least room for skepticism, both towards the lackluster amount of evidence as well as what actually happened.
I think most rural counties would struggle to attract remote workers. People have this dream of rural and small town life, and much it may be based on travel to destination rural and small towns, but most of non-urbanized America has little infrastructure, services, or cultural institutions. Good luck even getting a decent Internet connection.
The small towns that have this stuff also have very high cost of living. Small towns and exurbs on the fringes of metros may pick up people as workers can go into cities when they need to for work or play, but you couldn’t pay me to live in most rural counties in this country.
People not from small towns also underestimate the level of substance abuse that these areas have — either from excessive drinking (and often drinking and driving) and drugs. I’ve had multiple high school classmates from my Ohio town die of opioid overdoses.
Now that remote work has opened up as a possibility (at least for fortunate me), this topic now comes up a lot in our house: I'd like to move out of the Bay Area to a very low cost rural area, where we could get a house with land and live like a king and queen. My spouse looks at these areas and points out that sure, we'd save money, but we'd be king and queen of crap. She can more easily see the downsides of non-urbanized America than I can. I'm a shut-in, so I really don't care that a particular rural area has no night life or museums--hell, I basically didn't leave my computer chair throughout 2020-2021, and it was totally fine. But she has more of a social life, enjoys civilization, appreciates city infrastructure, and every time we drive out to look at one of these rural areas, it's really depressing for her to imagine living in one of these places.
I think -if- small towns even -want- to attract remote workers, they'd need to solve this appearance of not at least being part of civilization. That said, the whole "Californians Please Stay Away" meme is common to a lot of small towns across America, so it's likely these places don't want me moving there anyway.
The article is outdated. It now seems that the 2020 Census undercounted the population, partly because the pandemic made enumeration of the population especially difficult. See (for example) https://www.npr.org/2022/03/10/1083732104/2020-census-accura....
What's interesting to me is, anecdotally, there should be a mini-baby-boom based around the start of COVID lockdowns. At least local to me (DC metro), just about every young couple in my neighborhood had a baby sometime between early 2021 and early 2022.
However, the opposite happened. Likely that you are in the age where a lot of people get pregnant so this looked like a baby boom. In reality, birth went down in the western world.
I think a “harvesting effect” happened. A large chunk of people who were already thinking of having a kid decided to move up their plans to coincide with lock down. This results in a blip in birth statistics for the given month, but not for the overall year.
You're expecting the same result from this complete system shutdown followed by tentative reworking as from a temporary system shutdown caused by a bad snowstorm or government shutdown.
In reality, it seems the existential dread of the past couple years has suppressed birthrates whereas a temporary shutdown in the past similarly leaves couples with a lot of boredom but -- critically -- not concerned about the overall wellbeing of their world.
Exactly. The couples who did have kids all had them timed to coincide with the very first weeks of lockdown, before we all knew this thing was going to last for years.
And obviously not enough of them to offset decreased rates through the rest of the year.
And likely just regional/economic - I'm in an upper-middle class neighborhood and most people were able to work remotely and avoid the worst of the economic uncertainty.
Without the numbers, I would have said there was a snowstorm effect. With the numbers, there obviously wasn't.
In the California data, there's a pretty clear trend of (pop2020-pop2010)/pop2010. The counties losing population were mostly those under 100k, with the exception of Kings and Butte counties, the latter being exceptional as they suffered from an entire town being destroyed.
Note that this means the weighted experience of the overwhelming majority of people is they live in a growing county.
Once the bulk of the over-70s got vaccinated the impact of covid deaths was spread pretty evenly between generations over 30. So after summer 2021 (Delta and Omicron) this was not accurate.
I welcome this trend, since it gives workers more leverage to negotiate higher wages. The whole reason serfdom transitioned to capitalism was a massive reduction of workers due to the Black Plague.
Wages may be rising nominally, but now I'm fighting against hyperinflation of housing costs in ~10 metro areas. It's not so bad if your house is going up in value so you always have a down payment ready, but it's made it very challenging to buy a first home when the cost of a down payment is rising by the better part of an annual salary every year.
I don't know that it's any better in the counties with shrinking population. The shrinking population reduces demand for all the services they might have been able to perform at a higher wage. And housing prices still seem to be rising. Again, not a big deal if you already own a home, but I think it locks out a good portion of a whole generation from home ownership.
- any territory should allow at maximum the quantity of people the territory can properly nourish;
- we (humans) need a relatively young population because any country full of elderly is a dead one, so a certain "slow balance" is needed.
That's means, for instance, if today a territory can nourish enough from local *developed* resources 40% of it's resident that territory must spark a debate for crafting a process to push enough people to leave, no strong imposition, no force but a development that slowly realize the goal because so far commerce can provide food so there is no emergency and so nothing that demand emergency measures.
Similarly at population level: we are too much for our territory? Ok, so population need to reduce but of course just making less babies is not a solution because makes the population elder and prone to kill it in the mean/long run, again so far we still eat and live in general, so no emergency, we just need to incentive a single baby per family, if it's interesting to have a baby but not more than one we can probably control the demography. Again no obligation, no disincentives.
Such decisions must be done by public process with Democratic means, of course.
Long story short: acting quickly is a thing most understand, can agree or disagree but understand. Acting slowly looking at the long run is a complex thing most fail both to understand and see. We must improve in that area then...
No need to force, just "if you make one child you'll get some not small benefits, however those benefits are only for the first child, for eventual subsequent ones it's all at your charge and it's expensive".
Not extreme enough to force, but strong enough to makes people doing some math.
IMVHO sooner or later cities will switch from being "the richest part of the nation" to "internment camps/factories for modern slaves" where people living in live in a hierarchy capsule-hotel and Chinese level surveillance style just to work, while wealthy will be outside in modern homes benefiting from cities slave's work.
In mere territorial terms though I'm talking about a not that small administrative subdivision of a country, like a region/department and the design in terms of mere territory-wide planning like "here we will not allow new constructions anymore and we skyrocket some costs to push some out, there we allow new residential constructions, and there new factories/farms".
Something similar essentially already exists in all the developed world, only it's mostly tailored to satisfy some wealthy and political interests more than really wight territorial resources.
Anecdotally there is a website that tracks officer deaths for those killed in the line of duty. Right, wrong or indifferent they count COVID-19 deaths in their statistics and of the 84 deaths this year as of today, 50 are COVID! If you told someone the biggest danger of being law enforcement in 2022 is COVID I'm not sure people would believe you.
177 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadIt's pretty obvious last year was not part of a trend.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-population-growth-has...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-12-...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/net-...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/net-internati...
Also, immigrants tend to have more babies than do assimilated native-born Americans, as is also true in Europe. A direct result of the recent couple of decades of immigration would be a lot of larger families among immigrants, offsetting the trend toward smaller families or childlessness among native born white Americans (the least or 2nd least fertile subset of the population -- Asian Americans have lower overall birth rates).[2][3][4]
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenshoulberg/2021/07/11/here...
2. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/fertility-rates-in-the-u...
3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241514/birth-rate-by-eth...
4. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_01-508.pdf
Regarding the question of retirement... my wife and I have raised one kid, who is now 17. We're all on my company's group plan. I haven't seen the kind of expenses you are alluding to. However, university tuition is looming, and that WILL be expensive. Luckily, we have a 429 plan, which after 17 years has grown to be a decent sum.
The flip side of retirement is that children provide the parents with support in their old age. My mom, who just turned 95, has near constant attention from my sister who lives nearby. Many others I know are in the same boat - one or more children become their health advocates and protect them, and in some cases support them. Children, in my view, are a net asset, not a liability.
Definitely, but lack of mobility comes with its own (monetary and other) costs, in the modern economy especially.
> We're all on my company's group plan. I haven't seen the kind of expenses you are alluding to.
With most employers, adding your kid(s) to insurance most likely runs a few hundred dollars a month (over what you'd be paying otherwise) in premiums, and for the vast majority of people that'll still come with a large (high-four- or low-five-figures) max-out-of-pocket if something actually goes wrong with any of you. I expect spending ~$25,000 on medical expenses (including the birth and prenatal care, and cost of adding the kid to insurance) by the time a kid's 5 is fairly normal, even if the kid's fairly healthy (it can get so much worse than that if they're not), and that's just one expense. That figure's certainly in line with what I've seen for various friends who've started families in the last few years, ranging from very blue-collar up to other software developers.
There are employers who provide way better (very low max-out-of-pocket) insurance and cover most or all of the premium, even for family plans. Most people aren't employed by those employers, though.
I live in a city with, I gather, remarkably cheap child care. You're still looking at about $8,000/yr/kid if you don't mind a daycare that's not particularly good. If one partner stays home instead, the cost is much higher, even assuming pretty minimal earning potential. We do have family nearby, luckily, and we lean on them for help with child care all the time, but not for dedicated 5-days-a-week 48ish-weeks-a-year care. I'm sure some people get full-time care from family members who'd not otherwise be working, so it's basically free, but I doubt it's the norm.
Admittedly, the worst expenses are front-loaded. Lost income or childcare costs drop a lot when kids start going to school. The initial birth is gonna hit whatever your max-out-of-pocket is with your insurance, which is usually gonna be several thousand, but that's a one-time cost. Unfortunately, a dollar invested the day your kid is born is also worth a lot more than $1 by the time they leave the house, so the fact that it's front loaded isn't exactly a good thing, as far as retirement savings goes.
Lots of people are moving to big cities, immigration means that the population is still growing very slowly.
Even if all these small counties emptied out, I don't think many people would want to live in them, you can already snap up housing there at a bargain price.
It's only a bargain when you're looking at it from the perspective of someone making stupid money doing tech or high finance in a big city.
What I'd like to see but can't find in ten minutes of googling is a combination of these charts
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/housing-stat...
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/20...
So that I could see a median income / housing cost ratio by county.
I still think the main reason that people aren't moving into these small counties with cheap housing though is that nobody wants to live there.
By many metrics they're not pleasant places to live.
Also, considering I created city-data.com with information about U.S. cities and counties, I know ;)
My assumption is that instead of moving to the biggest cities in the us, people are spreading out amongst the smaller cities, not the myriad of tiny counties in the US.
Am I wrong?
EDIT:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220324065328/https://www.nytim...
"But the 10 fastest growing counties last year accounted for nearly 80 percent of the national total, a testament not so much to the rapid pace of change in these places, but to the lack of significant growth in the rest of the nation."
The elimination of poverty requires universal provision of education, women get educated, have less (no kids), birth rate drops and keeps dropping below the threshold of population stability.
I don't think there is any example of a society that has managed to reverse this trend. Maybe Ceaucescu Romania which at one point banned contraception and abortion, leading of course to the orphan crisis of the 1980's. Counter intuitively, devastating wars / famine also lead to post-crisis population boom, perhaps because education / career are entirely disrupted.
We probably need to think seriously about making people outside of the natural womb, can't see another way to reverse this trend outside of the above mentioned measures / circumstances
Israel is also booming economically as it is the 24th in terms of GDP per capita now and rising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... Israel has the 2nd largest per capita VC investment in the world: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/countries-most-startup-inve...
What are they doing that others are not?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/haredi-population-growing-twic...
1) immigration - of course Israel grants the right of every Jewish person to live in Israel, in fact paid an incentive to relocate. Presumably there a constant inflow from the Jewish diaspora and their descendants which might supplement the population
2) orthodox families, I'm guessing, have outsized families. Where women do not participate in the market economy, they end up having lots of kids instead
Again, no idea on the percentage contributions of either of these cases, but it might go some way toward explaining Israel's countervailing trend!
It's not just women. Somewhere around half of Haredi men do not work.
Or, stated less pejoratively, somewhere around half of Haredi men devote their lives to scholarship.
They were in education jobs until Covid, and now they’re in commerce jobs, but they’re obviously not productive members of society because of their religion?!?
As shocking as it might sound, yes.
It’s laughable to claim that people producing literal other people aren’t being productive.
TFR amongst secular Jewish women in Israel is 2.5. That's comfortably above the replacement level.
A woman who has a child is infinitely more productive than you are giving her credit for.
The US has a similar fertility-focused religious movement, but it's much more fringe and relatively smaller. Religious beliefs can drive super-high birth rates in pretty much any society, but aside from Israel, higher education has been associated with lower rates of religious belief. Declining religious participation and intensity of belief may well be contributing to the fall in global birth-rates.
You make it sound like this progression is inevitable like every slow decline is followed by a steep fall and then finally exponential bust which seems not very convincing.
It also creates friction politically, as the burden on the working populace increases due to a shift in working/non-working and almost no one wants to change for the worse. See the young vs the elderly and retirement ages, where the elderly will often vote for the young to carry the burden, and vice versa.
Long story short, it creates a situation where things have to change fundamentally or someone has to bite through the sour apple. Governments don't want to do either of these things.
What, really, is humanity doing? What is the point? The idea that our existence itself is ultimately grounded in economic growth feels pretty thin; I imagine it is to even the staunchest capitalists on any reflection.
There to me, is something ultimately embarrassing about this "problem". Its kinda like we invested a lot of time and resources to throw a party, and when only a few people show up, we start to diagnose what's wrong with those people that didn't come, and never once consider that it was a shitty party.
From where I sit, the relative cost of kids goes up. In major cities:
- Kids are expected to have their own bedrooms
- The cost of a 3-bedroom apartment is beyond the means of most families of child-bearing age
- For most people, life is debt-driven. Mortgage. Credit card. College. Etc.
- Work is out-of-the-house, so kids need child care, which is a major expense. With schools, kids still need child care after school. This is different from kids hanging out on a farm.
I'd like a big family, but I can't afford a big family. Ironically, my (poor) ancestors could.
A lot of this has to do with issues like zoning and building codes as well. Homes are /expensive/ to build in the US.
It's still doable but you have to sacrifice your standards of living, a tough trade-off to make.
In industrialization, we are talking about 4 years old spending whole day alone in the streets, while BOTH parents work 12 hours a day in factory. We are talking about kids that are small, because they dont eat enough. We are talking about 11 years old working in factories or selling newspapers for 10 hours a day, falling asleep on stairs due to being tired and expected to earn money for themselves and younger siblings.
> A lot of this has to do with issues like zoning and building codes as well.
The general trend of richer countries having fewer babies holds even in countries with wildly different zoning laws and expectations around living conditions. Japan’s fertility rate fell below replacement a long time ago, and even countries like India and Mexico are now at or below replacement levels.
For any given material explanation one can point to, there are clear counterexamples of countries without that material problem which still has a low fertility rate.
- The cost-of-living in India in Bangalore or Mumbai -- at a standard to afford a family -- is astronomical for relatively educated individuals making $10k/year. That's where affluent people live. It's not until you get into the real elites making $100k/year that it's easy again. That's the same worldwide. Even very poor countries have areas where these dynamics kick in.
- Where many poor people live, for example, on rural farms, it's possible to have lots of kids.
"Generous maternal benefits" don't come anywhere close to filling this gap.
You would expect some effect though, yet Northern Europe and Japan continue to have extremely low birth rates despite the efforts of their governments.
Also, many European countries saw fertility rates drop a long time ago, often back when housing was much, much cheaper. IIRC countries like Sweden and Norway dropped below replacement levels in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In countries I've been in, that period coincided with a move from farms, where land was ample, to cities, which were cramped. Big family housing wasn't really available; those cities had apartments which simply didn't really support larger families. Cost wasn't so much an issue for having a cramped 2 or 3 bedroom in the sixties, but beyond that, you moved into ultra-wealthy territory.
So I guess my question is whether you could write a little bit more about the Scandinavian countries. That's my own ignorance speaking.
Japanese cities are super-cramped. I would not want a big family in Tokyo.
Those adjustment factors would be things like -- what percentage of women have children, how many children do they have, how many children does the average nanny care for...
We could work through the various supply and demand factors, but, basically, whether compensated formally or not, if you hold the fertility rate fixed, then you also hold the amount-of-childcare fixed. There's some kind of conservation rule at work.
You can make the model a little bigger by including all the raising-of-children in those countries that are net exporters of people. Which there will be fewer and fewer of.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/in-georgia-a-religiously-inspired...
But is it something that needs to be "fixed"?
But obviously no one can pay that so either it's insurance or it goes to collections. In my case it's insurance. Only I've got a high deductible plan. 5k deductible. And because pregnancies go 9 months there's a chance that any given pregnancy costs 10k.
Meanwhile I asked my mom how much her pregnancies cost (all three c sections). Apparently insurance basically picked up all costs such that only trivial amounts were left over.
We've been extremely lucky to have ways to afford our children's births so far. Nothing we planned for just things that happened that saved us a ton of money. I honestly am not sure how most people handle this financially.
These lead to people postponing kids for years, so they all have them at the same time after. People in general don't want to have babies in high risk high danger situations.
At this point, its pretty clear that naturally starting and carrying a developing fetus is not an issue. Its the cost of the child after its born that's the issue. Having a bunch of babies coming out of artificial wombs is a recipe for disaster if they have no parents.
Have you learned nothing from the single parent household pandemic? Single parent children have much worse life outcomes than dual parent households. Zero parents? I'd imagine that would be worse.
1) Artificial wombs ≠ no parents. Kids might just be handed over to folks who want to parent but don't want the pregnancy / birth.
2) Kids could be raised by the state. Has been done before, though generally as a form of military service, thinking specifically of the Ottoman devshirme system; granted they did abduction, but are a decent example of state managed child rearing
3) Maybe robots could do the parenting. Eventually they may be able to make a passable attempt at it. Reminded of the movie 'Mother' - a dystopia obviously but still...better than no be at all!
Find a way to make the cost to parents zero over the lifetime of the kid for all the basics (child care, healthcare, food, clothing) and I bet rates shoot way up.
Having a kid is an extremely expensive luxury good right now. No wonder people are hesitant to do it.
though having a kid being a luxury good is likely a persistent condition regardless of how strong the welfare state is, unless you actually go to the point of paying women to have more children (something we should try btw). Right now the incentives are weak - cash bonus in some countries, some form of income support in others - all pretty small beer, not enough to make a difference!
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if that grow was limited to 25% of counties (guessing major urban center or at least "corridors").
This is just from my observation of central Illinois; I’m assuming it’s the same all over.
So their fate with respect to population decline is probably different than rural parts of Central Illinois or rural parts of the East and Midwest.
1. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/20...
* lower fertility rates
* fewer immigrants
* Covid deaths
* opioids deaths
* increasing productivity in farming with the destruction of small farms and increased economic inequalities
* crumbling infrastructure in rural areas, from closing supermarkets and schools to deficient roads and services
Except for Covid I don't think any of these trends will revert soon. Many of these counties have degraded so much that they might be uncapable of atracting remote workers.
* people can afford fewer children, and many no children at all
* I'm guessing here but possibly people are coupling at a lower rate, and are living single long-term
* more people happy to say that they just plain don't want children, and have other interests instead
Cost is the biggest one I can think of. If you didn't walk out of the hospital with a 8k bill (on a good delivery) and then have to figure out how to afford $1,500 per month childcare after 12 weeks unpaid leave, people would probably have a lot more kids.
https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm#:~:text=Fertil....
If people can't have children you can't fix that as easily as the factors causing people to not choose to have children.
A change to tax codes can immediately help alleviate the latter, for example.
Of course you are right that the underlying reasons are all relevant depending on the question, but they are all covered under the umbrella of "fertility rate".
In conclusion I am (pedantically?) arguing the definition of the term Fertility Rate, not anything else.
People are much more able to afford children today than in the past, and some of the most affluent places (e.g. DC) are the most childless.
I expect many the shine of many of the "pandemic homesteader" stories we've seen will tarnish pretty quickly as a result of this. How much of a discount are you willing to accept on the cost of living at the expense of safe drinking water? Are you old enough to be concerned about reliable emergency services, or access to a hospital? You're not getting a bargain by living in a rural area, you're getting the market price.
I agree up with well water, a septic field, and no sidewalks. Never doing that again. I want to be apart of human progress and have modern infrastructure. The septic field was probably the worst.
Access to healthcare is an issue depending on the area. There is zero financial incentive for healthcare workers to be in poor rural America. Really, though, it is a poverty issue. Rural areas, particularly those that were built around a specific and now defunct industry, such as coal mining, have a lack of available jobs and they are now unwilling to leave a town that no longer has a purpose to exist.
I've heard the opposite but it was all anecdotal. I heard surgeons and other doctors actually get paid a lot more to live in more rural areas because doctors generally don't want to live there so they have to do something to attract them.
As far as location is concerned, plenty of areas that are just 10 miles from a major metropolitan area are considered rural for census purposes. Owning a practice in a bucolic part of southern Connecticut is different from owning one in a Gold Rush ghost town. Population density is a still important, even if it matters less than it would for a major hospital system.
Not to mention there's the dating factor. While this may not be an issue for late-career/semi-retired doctors, the younger or divorced ones will face an ethical and professional dilemma regarding dating patients in a small town on top of the usual stressors in being a doctor.
Take Ault, Colorado, just for instance. Google says the population is 1,947. It declined from 2018 to 2019. (Not sure how Google knows that, when there wasn't a yearly census. Maybe better not to ask - Google's surveillance powers aren't the point here.)
Ault is this little small town. It's on a US highway. It's 17 minutes off of an interstate. It's 27 minutes to Fort Collins, a town of 100,000 people with a state university. It's 1:17 to Denver, a city of 4 million people.
So if you need a hospital, there's one 30 minutes away. If you absolutely need a big city hospital, it's an hour away. That's inconvenient, but you (hopefully) won't need it very often. Need an InstaCare type facility? There's probably one 20 minutes away, and almost certainly one 30 minutes away.
Need an appliance store? It's maybe 25 minutes away. Well, mine is 15 minutes away, and I'm in a big city.
Need a non-remote job? There's a fair amount of tech in Fort Collins. I've had worse commutes. (I didn't like them, but I've had them.)
So I'm not seeing the hard dichotomy between "big city" and "completely out in the sticks". It's a continuum.
(Certainly longer-standing trends will continue as trends, but... the "75%" stat seems like it'd point to covid isolation to me.)
[1]: https://ifstudies.org/blog/number-4-in-2021-more-faith-less-...
The small towns that have this stuff also have very high cost of living. Small towns and exurbs on the fringes of metros may pick up people as workers can go into cities when they need to for work or play, but you couldn’t pay me to live in most rural counties in this country.
People not from small towns also underestimate the level of substance abuse that these areas have — either from excessive drinking (and often drinking and driving) and drugs. I’ve had multiple high school classmates from my Ohio town die of opioid overdoses.
I think -if- small towns even -want- to attract remote workers, they'd need to solve this appearance of not at least being part of civilization. That said, the whole "Californians Please Stay Away" meme is common to a lot of small towns across America, so it's likely these places don't want me moving there anyway.
*Major ongoing cost of living spike (partially due to inflation) for people that would traditionally have kids.
However, the opposite happened. Likely that you are in the age where a lot of people get pregnant so this looked like a baby boom. In reality, birth went down in the western world.
A study in Canada: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/45-28-0001/2021001/artic...
In reality, it seems the existential dread of the past couple years has suppressed birthrates whereas a temporary shutdown in the past similarly leaves couples with a lot of boredom but -- critically -- not concerned about the overall wellbeing of their world.
And obviously not enough of them to offset decreased rates through the rest of the year.
And likely just regional/economic - I'm in an upper-middle class neighborhood and most people were able to work remotely and avoid the worst of the economic uncertainty.
Without the numbers, I would have said there was a snowstorm effect. With the numbers, there obviously wasn't.
Child poverty skyrocketed in the last year…
Note that this means the weighted experience of the overwhelming majority of people is they live in a growing county.
Covid primarily targets end of life individuals, so as that demographic shrinks so will the death rate.
Fertility however is another issue that I don't expect to fix itself anytime soon.
Once the bulk of the over-70s got vaccinated the impact of covid deaths was spread pretty evenly between generations over 30. So after summer 2021 (Delta and Omicron) this was not accurate.
I don't know that it's any better in the counties with shrinking population. The shrinking population reduces demand for all the services they might have been able to perform at a higher wage. And housing prices still seem to be rising. Again, not a big deal if you already own a home, but I think it locks out a good portion of a whole generation from home ownership.
- any territory should allow at maximum the quantity of people the territory can properly nourish;
- we (humans) need a relatively young population because any country full of elderly is a dead one, so a certain "slow balance" is needed.
That's means, for instance, if today a territory can nourish enough from local *developed* resources 40% of it's resident that territory must spark a debate for crafting a process to push enough people to leave, no strong imposition, no force but a development that slowly realize the goal because so far commerce can provide food so there is no emergency and so nothing that demand emergency measures.
Similarly at population level: we are too much for our territory? Ok, so population need to reduce but of course just making less babies is not a solution because makes the population elder and prone to kill it in the mean/long run, again so far we still eat and live in general, so no emergency, we just need to incentive a single baby per family, if it's interesting to have a baby but not more than one we can probably control the demography. Again no obligation, no disincentives.
Such decisions must be done by public process with Democratic means, of course.
Long story short: acting quickly is a thing most understand, can agree or disagree but understand. Acting slowly looking at the long run is a complex thing most fail both to understand and see. We must improve in that area then...
So kick everyone out of cities?
Not extreme enough to force, but strong enough to makes people doing some math.
In mere territorial terms though I'm talking about a not that small administrative subdivision of a country, like a region/department and the design in terms of mere territory-wide planning like "here we will not allow new constructions anymore and we skyrocket some costs to push some out, there we allow new residential constructions, and there new factories/farms".
Something similar essentially already exists in all the developed world, only it's mostly tailored to satisfy some wealthy and political interests more than really wight territorial resources.