Status?

Children are no longer a symbol of status, and they also reduce money status. Modern culture seems to prioritise other status ladders than making a family.

Of the 20 year old women I know, few seem to want children versus the old "I want a baby" stereotype for young women. When one has a baby and their peer group wanted to copy them.

There's also less social norm or expectation to get married and have kids. Perhaps for many in my society it was just going with the flow?

Watch high-influence people (that others wish to emulate) and how many are bragging about their baby? Passé.

Everyone needs to read the section about demographic data.

Big claims:

- The United Nations is systematically over-estimating fertility. (Table A1)

- The United Nations is assuming inplausible fertility rebounds (B.2)

- The world is already below the replacement rate. (B.4)

- The world population will peak in 30 years.

He has been saying this in his lecture "Demographic Future of Humanity" which you can find on YouTube, but now we have finally have the paper.

We need to make this common knowledge.

The tech connection on this is that phones expand the radius of the circle of peers - people that a given person can see and copy. But most of the problem is as Fernandez-Villaverde says: modernity itself, the expansion of money into more and more areas of life.