[tuatoru]

Industrial market economies.

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.

[palmotea]

> 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.

Truly the best economic system, amirite?