[keiferski]

The vast majority of corporations don’t offer the benefits yours does, nor have they for the last fifty years. Your situation is extremely unique and not at all typical.

If this was a conspiracy, your point about not having consumers would make sense. But it’s not a conspiracy, it’s merely entities acting in their short term interests - which they are incentivized to do by the nature of the stock market.

Also remember that this is during the era of increasing globalization, when global corporations are in many ways more concerned with international markets than with local ones.

You also vastly underestimate how social attitudes have changed in the last 70 years, and how this is not at all just something that “naturally” happened.

[simonh]

Consumerism and media affect everyone though, but even within countries and within specific demographic groups higher wealth and higher education lead to lower birth rates. That's true everywhere.

People aren't all just corporate puppets having all their strings pulled by shadowy overlords. It's not like China with the one child policy, which I'm familiar with as my wife is Chinese. Sometimes people just make their own decisions. They make them for reasons sure, that's why there is a trend because people in similar situations tend to make similar choices overall, but nobody planned for all of this to happen.