The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion).
Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households.
Edit: Japan, China, Korea, and Thailand are speed-running the process. Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and India are not far behind - all states of India except Bihar already have sub-replacement fertility for instance.
> The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion).
> Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households.
This. It's not some bargain-bin homo economicus thinking like the GP proposes ("Children are assets when they can help with farm work..."). It's that capitalism has evolved to squeeze the life out of everything in order to maximize short-term profits for the shareholders, and it's corrupted almost everything that stands in its way.
And with AI, there's hope that capitalism can continue unabated even after literally squeezing the population to death.
With a lot of old people, healthcare costs go way up. In practice that means taxes go way up.
(Maybe smart AI can magically cure a lot of degenerative diseases like dementia and atherosclerosis and COPD and osteoarthritis and cancer and diabetes and kidney failure. Let us hope.)
The infrastructure we have (roads, bridges, water supplies, power lines, etc.) need maintenance. With a falling population, a greater percentage of the population needs to be dedicated to these tasks, so career choices get restricted.
(Maybe robotics can help here. Let us hope.)
With a falling population demand for any given product is falling on average.
When the population is growing, there is an implicit cushion for investment. 2% growth means that the population (TAM) doubles in 36 years, making investment less risky. With falling population, new investment is taking market share from existing vendors: competition is zero-sum at best, mostly negative sum.
Every investment is more risky so the rate of interest on loans goes way up.
With falling GDP, wages are stagnant or falling. At present young people take on debt to buy houses and things, partly in the expectation that their wages will rise so the debt gets easier to pay off over time. Falling wages make debt repayment harder, not easier, so people will not take out loans. so sales will be lower, leading to a downward spiral.
Difficulty accessing birth control is greatly overstated by UN and other development agencies.
In surveys by far the dominant reasons for not using it are "my husband does not want me to" or "my family does not want me to". Those are included in "unable to access".
Traditionally, female years of education, child mortality, and GDP per capita (in order of importance) explain 85% of fertility, and the residual is not biased in either direction.
source: Lant Pritchett, long-time development economist.
Edit: I don't think anyone outside the Taliban seriously wants to reverse the trends in any of those 3 factors.
No. The French Revolution was a revolution of lawyers, writers, and administrators, the elite who were shut out of the very highest positions. And it was unstable. The great majority of people were just cannon fodder for Napoleon.
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