In one of his first acts in office, newly confirmed US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy put out a memo dictating that “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average” be given preference in transportation funding.
What kinds of communities would benefit from this policy? If the first answer that springs to mind is “communities in Utah,” you are right. Among US states, Utah had the highest percentage of households led by married couples and the highest birthrate in 2023. Outside Utah, the picture becomes less clear because birth and marriage rates do not match up especially well. Marriage rates in the US rise with affluence while birthrates fall — until, in a shift seen across the developed world over the past few years, you get to households with annual incomes of US$200,000 or more.
There is no such pattern by geography. Compare the two measures across US counties rather than income groups, and the correlation goes from negative to effectively nonexistent. That is, there is a very slight positive correlation, with an r-squared of 0.006, meaning the variation in one measure “explains” just 0.6 percent of the variation in the other.
Illustration: Mountain People
Mash the two measures together at the census tract level, as Yonah Freemark and Lindiwe Rennert of the Urban Institute recently did, and Duffy’s policy appears to favor low-density, car-dependent, high-income areas with high percentages of white residents. With the possible exception of the bias toward high-income areas — of which the very highest tend to be in and around Democratic-leaning coastal cities — that does not sound like much of a change from where Republicans have been trying to steer transportation funding for decades.
The birth-and-marriage preference probably would not make transportation policies of US President Donald Trump’s administration look all that much different than they would have otherwise. Relying on birth and marriage statistics does mean the department would need for the US Census Bureau and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to keep churning them out, a somewhat reassuring note as Trump administration’s actions keep making government data disappear.
The policy also makes for a good excuse to look at the complicated geography of birth and marriage in the US. First, from the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System, here are 2023 birthrates by state: As noted, Utah was No. 1, at 13.2 births per 1,000 population. Vermont was last at 7.8.
Only two states that voted for former US vice president Kamala Harris last year (Minnesota and New Jersey) had above-average birthrates in 2023, so giving transportation-funding preference to high-birthrate states does have some partisan political implications.
However, a number of red states have below-average birthrates, too. Switching to the births metric usually called the fertility rate — measured by the CDC as births per 1,000 women aged 15 through 44 — does not change the overall complexion of the map, although it does knock Utah down to eighth place — South Dakota is No. 1. Vermont remains last.
The CDC also has births data by county, but only for counties with 100,000 or more residents. By far the highest fertility rates in 2023 were in Rockland County, New York and Ocean County, New Jersey, both home to large ultra-orthodox Jewish communities. In the birthrate data, Ector County, Texas, home of fracking jobs and Friday Night Lights, nudged Ocean County aside for second place. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau offers five-year average data on births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 50 for almost every county in the country from its American Community Survey, with the caveat that for counties of less than 100,000 people the survey’s margins of error can be quite large, in some cases bigger than the fertility rates.
Some of the county-to-county variation here, especially in rural areas, is just those margins of error at work. However, there does seem to be a pattern, most visible among the larger counties of the West Coast, of low fertility rates in central urban counties and higher ones in cheaper, less-dense counties nearby.
What about the marriage rates? If the department were to use the CDC’s state marriage-rate statistics, obtained by dividing the number of marriage licenses granted each year by population, it would be a huge boon for Nevada and Hawaii, because so many people from other states get married there. One imagines the department would instead use Census Bureau estimates of the percentage of households led by married couples. Utah and Idaho are the clear standouts here and are very Republican, but beyond that there is not much of a partisan lean. Utah and Idaho are also of course strongholds of the very family-oriented Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka the Mormons.
At the county level, the affluence effect starts to emerge, with a suburban high-marriage-rate belt running from New York to northern Virginia, and rural low-marriage-rate zones apparent in the Southwest and the so-called black belt of the deep south. Also, while hard to see in the map, there is a clear pattern of lower marriage rates in urban counties and higher rates in nearby suburban ones.
The dearth of families in cities, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, is a phenomenon that has already received a lot of attention. It is generally attributed to causes other than lack of transportation. Steering transportation funding away from such places certainly would not help, although with families already having voted with their feet, it might make some sense for infrastructure investment to follow.
More broadly, there is the question of how to encourage people to get married and have babies, which while not spelled out in the department memo seems likely to be part of the motivation behind it. The two do seem to be related over time, with birthrates and rates of marriage and cohabitation falling all over the world over the past few decades. Demographer Lyman Stone has suggested that the most important cause might be a relative decline in young men’s incomes, because a partner with a steady income provides an essential insurance policy for women contemplating the financial and other risks inherent in childbirth. Adding new lanes to suburban freeways probably would not help to reverse that.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of The Myth of the Rational Market. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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