Short recorded answer by Jim Penman arguing that technology lowers birth rates indirectly by creating wealth and urbanization; historically similar patterns occurred (e.g., late Roman Republic, Chinese families rising into cities) and today are enabled further by contraceptive methods (the pill) and practices like abandonment or abortion when children are unwanted.
Well, technology creates wealth. And what causes birth rates to drop is money is wealth and urbanization. And that's just not the case of the modern world. This was the case, say, in the late Roman Republic, when the birth rate was dropping. It's the case of, if you look at leaps throughout history of the Chinese college entry, you find the very fertile peasant families become wealthy, become merchants, they succeed in the imperial exam, they move to the towns, the cities, and the birth rates would just plummet and they just basically die out within a few generations. That was a typical thing. So it's not just the modern world, it's wealth, urbanization as far as technology is concerned. Obviously what makes it possible these days is the pill and all the different things. But the fact is, people don't want children. They'll work out a way to get rid of them in the old. In the ancient world, they used. They used to abandon babies if they had too many. Obviously people can use abortion and so forth. If you really don't want children, you're not going to have them.
Rising mental illness and falling birth rates have the same cause, it is this.....
