About all countries https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521 there is some exceptions like Nigeria(dropping slowly) but generally fertility rate is dropping all over world.
I wish fertility drops much harder in Nigeria. We have a very high poverty rate over here (40%) [1], but projections say we'll surpass China in population by 2100 [2]. I dread to think of what'll it'll be like that projection comes to pass.
Once you get rid of all the irrational babies (e.g. through unplanned unprotected sex), the rational babies never get born as people notice how "unprofitable" it is to have children.
I've not seen societies going down for this, but it's easy to see a well-positioned families have one child and financially poor families have 5 or more children.
Eastern Europe is firmly on this path under the twin depopulation factors of abysmal fertility and powerful brain drain towards the West. Come visit a middle-sized town anywhere in the Three Seas region and you’ll see industry, infrastructure, housing built for a much larger, more successful civilization.
I personally think the euro is a failure. It only works if every nation cooperates and the nation at the heart of the euro zone (Germany) doesn't play along with the rest.
For example, a simple way to make the euro area boom again is to let wages in Germany rise. This will never happen as German politicians think that exporting goods to eastern europe while never importing anything back is sound economics and politics.
Some economists point at Say's Law (people sell something because they want to buy something else) which postulates that this behavior should be impossible or at least highly irrational and resolves itself over the long term. Yet for some strange reason Germans have instinctively discovered that money is superior over goods and services and this hasn't changed at all since the euro was introduced.
In my opinion, neoliberalism is not really the source of the problem but rather a misguided attempt at serving near endless demand for efficiency and competitiveness. One could argue that the owners of the means of production are themselves just puppets of a higher force.
Think about lending a sack of potatoes with interest. If the borrower really needs potatoes today he might accept that offer, but what if he doesn't? Threatened with the prospect of having your potatoes go bad, it is you that is in trouble and therefore must lower the amount of interest that you charge. Even 0% interest may be profitable to you as getting fresh potatoes back next year would be still better than having yours spoil. There is an opportunity cost to doing nothing (spoilage is a effectively a negative interest rate), therefore the negotiations happen in a way that both parties end up happy.
Now repeat the exercise with money. As the lender you can always walk away from the deal and collect 0% interest on your cash but as money is necessary for economic specialization (through employment at a company) there will always be a borrower who will take your money. As the lender has the upper hand in these negotiations, he can get away with charging way more interest than he really ought to and we can forget the idea of 0% interest altogether.
The end result? People twist their brain into somehow paying that excessive interest. There is your endless demand for efficiency and competitiveness. Of course, thanks to our central banks interest rates do fall, but the potato analogy still isn't true. Once money spoils (negative interest rates), the problem is most likely gone.
It’s generally true that as people become richer and better educated, fertility goes down. In the US, I think it’s also true that women have fewer children than they would like (common reason being that it is expensive in absolute terms and opportunity cost) so another question is whether the state should do things to allow people to do the things that both they and the state want.
There is a qualitative difference between human and animal societies.
"One morning, working alone in the attic, I came across some boxes of skeletons that had been dug up from a monastery. I was soon to be reminded of a lecture given by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who spent much of her life studying primitive culture. She asked the question, What is the earliest sign of civilization?” A clay pot? Iron? Tool? Agriculture? No, she claimed. To her, evidence of the earliest true civilization was a healed femur, a leg bone, which she held up before us in the lecture hall. She explained that such healings were never found in the remains of competitive savage societies, There, clues of violence abounded: temples pierced by arrows, skulls crushed by clubs. But the healed femur showed that someone must have cared for the injured person – hunted on his behalf, brought him food, and served him at personal sacrifice. Savage societies could not afford such pity. I found similar evidence of healing in the bones from the churchyard."
The fact that something is a social construct does not mean that it is not important and has not rules by which the members of said society have to live by. Money and democracy are social constructs too.
Ironically, societies that do not steer girls to parenthood are subject to extinction. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's just the law of nature.