John Burn-Murdoch

And so that creates this barrier where their ideal answer is two, but their answer is a person standing here today thinking about their life.

Maybe they don't even have a partner, let alone thinking about kids.

And that answer in practical terms of where they are today might not be two.

Yeah, so I think one thing to say here as well is there are lots of things going on here.

There are many overlapping factors and the exact mix in the pan, as it were, will be slightly different in different countries.

Now, I came into this expecting that housing would be a big one, right?

Especially, you know, I'm here in London, you're there in Ireland.

two of the countries in the world that have had the roughest time for housing for young people.

And housing does seem to have an impact, right?

So in countries like ours that really elevate the importance of homeownership, you basically think, well, if I'm going to have kids and a family, I need to own my home.

And so what we saw obviously between the 90s and early 2000s and then the 2010s was this big decline in young people in their 20s and even 30s owning homes.

And what I did was you can calculate what we call a counterfactual where you say, right, given that we know people who own their homes have more kids than those who rent.

If young people owned their homes at the same rate as they did tail end of the 90s, early 2000s, what would birth rates have looked like?

And the answer is they would be higher, but they would still have then declined over the last 10 to 15 years.

So you would have been sort of shifting up the level

But people who own their homes today, young people who own their homes today are still having fewer kids than they were in the past.

Young people who rent their homes today are still having fewer in the past.

So housing is definitely a factor, especially in the English speaking world with our crazy housing markets.

But it's not the definitive thing for this recent trend.

Exactly.