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Comment by pythia__ | Hacker News Reader

A fundamental problem with huge cities is that smart, talented people go there and never have children who would inherit they smarts. For this reason they are a human resource drain on everywhere else. In short, "cities are IQ shredders" (per http://www.xenosystems.net/iq-shredders/).

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The argument your link makes is that Singapore has low fertility therefore cities are bad, and I'm not being reductionist here that is literally all the content to be found there.

How do you uncouple the effect that the people moving into cities have on the city fertility rate from the effect the city has on the fertility rate of the people moving into it? Cities offer things that are valuable to people who don't want children (like, high utility activity for the time they aren't spending raising the children they don't have, compared to places that aren't cities) so they are especially attractive to people who don't want children, and you would expect any place that is attractive to people who don't have children to have a low fertility rate.

Exactly. A common pattern is also that people are more likely to move out of a city once they plan to raise children.

This trend has been reversed in the last decade here in Germany.

http://www.berliner-mieterverein.de/magazin/online/mm0914/09...

> n auf Kernstädte fest. Auch Familien orientieren sich mehr und mehr in Richtung der City-Bereiche. Bis zur Jahrtausendwende waren viele 25- bis 49-Jährige hinaus ins grüne Umland gezogen, um dort ihre Kinder großzuziehen. Das scheint sich umzukehren. Der in den 90er Jahren weit verbreitete Trend zur Suburbanisierung sei weitgehend zum Erliegen gekommen, so die Wissenschaftlerin in ihrer Studie.

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