Dear Reason,

Apropos this:

Free Exchange over at The Economist website is discussing the role of government policy in influencing fertility. They argue that if governments want to influence people to have more children, they should spend more on roads to foster a suburban lifestyle.

I would conjecture that causality is exactly the opposite: people with children sort themselves into suburban areas and not that suburbia makes people have more children. The effect is similar to how fat people sort themselves to suburban area as shown in this study.

Don’t expect a baby boom to coincide with highway spending.

Free Exchange did not argue that, “If governments want to influence people to have more children, they should spend more on roads to foster a suburban lifestyle.” A close reading reveals that Megan McArdle argued that point, and Free Exchange argued that such a belief is not consistent with the idea that government cannot influence fertility. I don’t expect highway construction to lead to a baby boom, particularly since births per thousand women are lower in suburbs than in central cities or in rural areas. I do however suspect that forty years of massively funding highways will lead to suburban growth (and all the lovely associated consquences).

Yours truly,

Ryan