1) The Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions lowered infant mortality rates and increased life expectancy. The labor force required in agriculture decreased both quantitatively (modern societies are no longer composed of 70% farmers) and qualitatively (workers no longer need to have many children to support them in old age).
2) Urbanization, which occurred alongside the abandonment of the countryside, created societies centered around cities—places where, historically, due to lack of space, fertility rates have been lower. Even at the beginning of the 20th century, when people in Europe were having 4–5 children each, birth rates in cities were not much higher than the replacement level.
3) The Industrial Revolution required a mass of educated individuals, including women. Educated women, by spending more years within the educational system, delayed the average age of their first child. The Industrial Revolution also brought about the advent of contraceptives.
4) The society that emerged after the post–World War II economic boom became oriented more toward consumption than ideals. Once people attained widespread economic well-being, they stopped believing in the nation, in God, or in the proletarian revolution as driving forces toward the future. Societies taken out of history by World War II (Western Europe in the 1980s, Eastern Europe in the 1990s, the Far East and Latin America in the 2000s) witnessed a decline in communal life and the rise of individualism. An individualistic society based on consumption and sustained by the miracles of the Industrial Revolution sees children not as liberation, but as a burden.
5) Social media: we now spend, on average, more than five hours glued to our phones. Today’s generations are numbed and do not think about having children.
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