[MilStdJunkie]

Whew, boy. There's a ton of loaded phrases in this piece . . which, well, I'll let others do the googling. Anyway. Ideologies (Evangelicals, Feminists, Transsexuals, Insert-Your-Evil-Genius-Here) don't shunt people's life decisions around willy nilly like this. Money does. People don't have kids in industrialized countries because children rapidly transform from a net investment to a net burden. Thus, ideal industrialized states have political policy to skim improved industrial productivity into incentives for childbirth[1]. This typically doesn't happen, so kids don't happen either.

This isn't a new phenomenon; urban areas eat birthrates, and you can see it in records from as long ago as the 14th century. Industrialization turns urbanization up to 11.

[1] Or a rational immigration / naturalization policy, but that's another subject, and it's not really tenable for some cultures.

[wing-_-nuts]

Yep, people's behavior respond to incentives, and in most developed economies, each kid represents a major sacrifice instead of the 'investment' they used to be.

If you want more kids, you have to make the cost of having them lower. This means building more housing, subsidizing childcare like france and sweden, but stronger, and making higher ed affordable.

Now all that costs a lot of money. To do that, we'd need to cut spending on other things, and raise taxes. I don't buy the assertion from Zeihan and others that it's impossible though.

[medvezhenok]

It's also highly correlated to declines in religiosity (though that might itself correlate with urbanization / increased wealth). Fertility rates were dropping in France in the 18th century because of a secularization push (observed by counting the frequency of religious references in people's wills correlated to family size).