A scan of the paper seems to show that they don't consider the confounding influence of urban density. Humans don't seem to have innate "quorum sensing" the way bacteria do, but expensive housing is likely to have something to do with it

https://www.pacificresearch.org/housing-costs-drove-the-majo...

not to mention the perception (if not reality) of an unsafe environment

https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-25-00236.html

and between leftists dogpiling in big cities where their votes don't count and those cities making it close to impossible to build housing that has to be a factor, together with individualism, anti-natalism, etc.

▲

dlcarrier 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Metro areas in the south still have higher fertility rates: https://www.statista.com/statistics/432838/us-metropolitan-a...

If it were just a matter of population density, not just metro area population, then low-density high-population metro areas, like those on the west coast, would still have high fertility rates, but they are lower than the high-density high-population metro areas on the east coast.

There seems to be a much stronger correlation to culture or general location than population density.

▲

FiatLuxDave an hour ago | parent [-]

Rarely have I seen someone shoot down their own argument with a link quite as effectively as this.

You might want to google those cities, since every single one that I've checked is a small population city surrounded by rural area.

Your argument about cultural influence might be more persuasive if you compared larger cities.

	▲	PaulHoule 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't disbelieve the cultural influence myself but I'm pretty sure that urbanization matters. I think the master narrative of human civilization is that almost all of us had ancestors working in subsistence agriculture a few generation ago who have moved or are moving into urban areas. This transition is largely complete in the US and Europe, happened explosively in China post-1980 and is about 2/3 complete there and is less far along in Africa and South America. Birth rates go down in this process.