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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

It would have been good to see an x-y plot of living with parents vs. fertility. Eyeballing the maps he showed, I don't see a great correlation. Scandinavia has mediocre fertility compared to the rest of Europe, but the lowest percentage living with their parents. Other nations like Greece do satisfy his hypothesis, but a real test would be to plot those two percentages on an x-y plot and see how well they correlate (or calculate an R-squared, or both).

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https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRhDMqe8boEY...

I don't see any correlation at all.

The data don't lie on a line, but at least they lie on a plane.

Thanks! I agree. The R-squared of these numbers is 0.11, which is much closer to 0 (no relation) than to 1 (perfect correlation).

That’s a very misleading framing though. An R-Squared if 0.11 would be pretty damn important if rigorously demonstrated. This is not rigorous though.

Optical regression score: "All over the place worse than my darts game after a few pints of gin"

Though, often a rank vs. rank scatter plot is more enlightening than a scatter plot of the raw data.

pints of gin?!

That's part of the joke, stolen from Critical Drinker's YouTube commentary on film narrative.

I took down the data manually and got a correlation coefficient of -0.28. I'm not sure whether it's even reasonable to expect the relationship to be linear but IIRC that level of correlation is about as high as you get in the social sciences.

And you can't discount the possibility that it's not housing that's depressing fertility but the economic situation of young couples. Scandinavia is comparatively rich and has great social benefits. Italy, Greece, Spain are all countries that suffered under the last financial crisis and unemployment is high, esp. for younger adults.

So, maybe we just see wealth as a the root cause at play

Over-simplifying things, the more prosperous a society is, the less children are born. Doesn't seem to be too far left field to assume more young people are living with their parents in less-prosperous societies.

Adults and in some cases minors get free housing in Finland, so naturally few people choose to live with their parents. Maybe similar in Scandinavia?

For more numerous and granular data points, Eurostat doesn’t seem to measure this below country level, however US Census does. At least, I can easily find maps and papers which use that reference, but not the exact data table quickly. I know I had to grep and visual grep IPUMS dumps with similar projects before.

In the meanwhile, I’m biased to buy the hypothesis and have reasonable trust in the studies Caplan quoted, but a graph would be properly convincing.

Correlation does not imply causation. One of the lowest-fertility/highest living-with-parents countries on the map has people living with parents because of a multigenerational family culture. People have been living with parents for generations, and having kids just fine.

Living with parents doesn't carry the same stigma as in the US or Western Europe.

The reasons for low fertility have nothing to do with living with parents there. They have everything to do with complex and rapid social changes following the fall of communism which are too long and complex to get into.

I actually agree with the overall conclusion *in the US*, and likely in other parts of the world. However, the argument seems flakey.

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