Will the trend toward low birth rates be reversed?

During the sluggish 2008-13 economy, young Americans stayed put in tiny child-unfriendly apartments in hip coastal central cities like New York and San Francisco. They paid high rents resulting from stringent environmental restrictions. This was hailed as a move toward progressive attitudes.

But evidently not. As NewGeography.com proprietor Joel Kotkin has observed, when growth returned, young people began heading to children-friendly suburbs and exurbs, ditching subway facecards for SUV fobs.

All of which raises the possibility that current stubbornly low birth rates may be on the verge of a rise, away from the economically and culturally divided, low-brith-rate society described of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and perhaps toward something suggested by Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”