Birth rates fall everywhere, and all at once

(newsflash, the defining problem of our time is NOT climate change or some other irrelevant neo-religious ferver #1490834)

What's the big deal? WEEELLL... not good (aside from the cooperation, division of labor, innovation tendencies etc):

Population ageing shrinks the workforce and exerts a drag on growth in productivity and living standards — Japan’s stagnation since the 1990s is almost entirely explained by low birth rates that have shrunk its working-age population. Fiscal pressure from ballooning spending on pensions and care also crowds out investment in infrastructure, helping create a sense of decline that fuels anti-system politics.

...cough, fuck the boomers...

And the search for the holy grail is figuring out why exactly this happened, and what can be done about it (=nothing... every government effort thrown at it has failed in practice).

"The stereotypes often associated with this trend include women putting careers before children, or couples who choose not to have them despite plenty of disposable income.""The stereotypes often associated with this trend include women putting careers before children, or couples who choose not to have them despite plenty of disposable income."

the decline in births and coupling is much steeper among those with the least education and lowest incomes. By contrast the share of university graduates forming couples and having children is stable or even rising in some cases

the absence of long-term housing acts as a barrier to other long-term commitments. But this cannot account for the most recent steep decline or its global breadth. In the Nordic region, for example, fertility has fallen despite economic stability and a rise in the number of young adults living on their own, rather than with parents or flatmates.

Birth rates are often collapsing despite, not because of, people’s desires. Most young men and women still report wanting around two children — even in South Korea where most women now have zero. Instead, there is a “fertility gap” between goals and outcomes, due to frictions and frustrations that have much to do with modern lifestyles — including our homes and, increasingly, our phones.

Nope, it's not the broken moneyNope, it's not the broken money

In country after country the birth rate plunged after the introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the downturn — a mirror image of smartphone usage patterns.

And the pre-digital screens were to blame as well:

In 2001, researchers Robert Hornik and Emile McAnany found that there was a stronger link between falling birth rates and television ownership than between income or education. A decade later a study by Eliana La Ferrara and others found that watching TV soap operas that portray small families led women to have fewer children, and in 2018 Adrienne Lucas and Nicholas Wilson found that owning a television led couples to have less sex. Considering smartphone usage is heavier and more solitary than television viewing, the effects could be much larger.

I don't quite understand what it is about the mesmerizing screens that somehow, via messing with our minds and desires, result in a) having fewer kids, b) coupling up less.

Surely some Bitcoiners in here will spin it as "it's the money, stupid" and I'm looking forward to hearing that (even more unbelievable) pitch.

We really fucked our societies ("we"; well, the Boomers. It was always the Boomers, them commie parasites).

"Even apart from our diminishing propensity to have children, the task of bringing together a fractured and frustrated generation is the challenge of our times.""Even apart from our diminishing propensity to have children, the task of bringing together a fractured and frustrated generation is the challenge of our times."

https://archive.md/aNqOq