If you’ve been on social media in the past 10 years, you’ve surely seen it: The lamentation that it’s impossible for young adults in America today to buy a home. This is a complaint as likely to be offered by populist conservatives as by Taylor Lorenz-style progressives. The new right’s emphasis on family formation and declining fertility rates, in combination with the populist skew of young conservatives, has boosted the issue of housing costs in center-right circles. However, there’s just one problem with blaming unaffordable homeownership for declining family formation: it gets the causality backwards.

Fertility increased during the tax holiday year, suggesting that even though Icelanders had a strong incentive to make more money that year, they instead chose to have more babies.

This Christmas Eve, as I’ve done every year since I was a child, I joined my father’s side of the family at my aunt’s house, a few blocks away from where I grew up in Bethlehem, PA. I’m the second youngest of 16 cousins, many of whom are much older than me and have children anywhere from between 2 and 22. And there’s a whole brood of second cousins between 4 and 8.