[win311fwg]

While the official youth unemployment rate in Niger is something like 0.5%, that includes things that wouldn't count by western standards (e.g. sustenance farming). The youth unemployment rate there, by how we measure it, is more like 50%. To call the situation in Japan or the USA a crisis compared to that is laughable. Yet they have a fertility rate of ~6 births per woman. You've come up with a fun theory, but it clearly doesn't work.

Fertility is on the decline, particularly in the west, although increasingly spreading, quite simply because it is socially unacceptable to have children. Society says you need to focus on your career instead. It creates TV shows, like "16 and Pregnant", designed to dissuade viewers from having children. So on and so forth. Social pressure is a powerful drug.

In fact, the pocket communities where certain religions that push a 'make babies' agenda are commonly observed, where the social pressure goes in the other direction, we find many families pumping out kids like there is no tomorrow. Social pressure works both ways, but the "having kids is cool" is not the prevailing social wind.

[pibaker]

Dismissing youth employment as a concept because some countries still plow their fields by hand isn't a good argument. You can just look at peer countries and compare them. Surely you can’t think that youth unemployment does not reflect any major difference between Spain and Germany right.

[win311fwg]

You will find no dismissal of youth employment as a concept. There would be no reasonable way to dismiss the concept as one only has to quickly look outside to see that youth are employed. What was the intended purpose of introducing this nonsensical tangent?