No Country for Young Children

Families are fleeing to the exurbs and taking their kids with 'em

• Who is driving the increase in (low) unemployment (a brief reprise and revision)?

• No country for young children

• NYC is a shining star (of family flight)

• Exurbia is where the kids at, and the future is sunny

• Harris County is special

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What lies beneath low, but rising, unemployment (reprise and revised)?

First, a quick coda on yesterday’s post about unemployment.

Random Walk speculated that unemployment was being driven by the long slow tail of White Collar Stagnation, and a more recent uptick in Migrant Saturation.

Random Walk is probably incorrect, at least in part.

From the estimable Parker Ross (again), unemployment is driven primarily by native born job-losers, both the young type and the prime age type:

Parker Ross/Arch Capital

Prime age job-losers are leading the longer-term unemployed category, while younger job-losers are more recently unemployed.

It’s not the best, but it’s not in freak-out territory yet. Normalizing and deteriorating can look the same sometimes, and that may well be what’s going on.

Anyways, the part that I might be right about is the White Collar Stagnation. The fact that prime age native born workers who lost their jobs more than 15 weeks ago are driving the largest part of the 2-year increase in unemployment is consistent with the long-tail of people who have been let-go-with-long-severance a while back.

The part that I’m less right about is the migrant saturation.

It’s definitely true that unemployment is rising quickly amongst foreign-born, but it’s fairly negligible in the big scheme of things:

Foreign new-entrants are a small part of the overall unemployment picture.

Anyways, still more to come, I’m sure.

Powell seems to be watching this, as well, so that’s good to know.

Now, on to the show.

No Country for young children

Everyone knows, at this point, that we don’t make enough babies.

Everyone also knows that cities especially are fertility shredders, for no other reason than space and ‘fewer strangers’ are both more valuable with young kinds around, while ‘buying cigarettes at the bodega at 3am’ is somewhat less valuable.

Everyone also knows that people in general have been fleeing cities, and young families, especially so.

Flight from cities has slowed, but it’s still way ahead of the pre-pandemic pace:

EIG

Domestic out-migration is about 2x larger than it was in 2018 (and natural change, has contracted as well).

In fact, without a huge influx of immigrants, “large urban counties” wouldn’t be growing at all.

So that’s what everyone knows.

What everyone might not know is the NYC takes ‘family flight’ to a whole new level.