re: #47 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

and a society that reveres “family” in the sense of maintaining tradition and not in encouraging families to have more children.

But it’s happened after the baby boom of the 1950s. Increased affluence led more families to invest resources in one or two children to perpetuate the middle class life that only came after the 1960s for many. Then of course the bubble burst of the ’90s has meant that fewer men feel that they can provide for a family on what they can scrape together from the gig economy while young women prefer living at home, putting off marriage until until late 20s or early 30s (if getting married at all) so that they can save their income to enjoy an occasional lunch out and a Louis Vitton bag (even if it’s really a knock off) and the demographic arrow starts to point down. The slow death of the agricultural village is a side effect, I guess.