rkajdi posted:

Also, the cost of raising a child has always been expensive. If the difference is between having 1-2 kids or having 5 and being a dirtfarmer, rational people are going to choose the former. A large part of the reason for higher birthrates was that women weren't given any agency, much less control over family size. It's now pretty apparent that outside of some zealot outliers, when women get to choose how many kids they want, they choose a sub-replacement number. You can't really "fix" this without destroying women's agency, so we might as well start planning for a world with less people instead of more.