Technology shock, fewer shotgun marriages, and the rise in unwed births (1996)
This is fascinating.  I think that unwed births also likely decrease family size because it is a struggle to support based on one parent in the household.  Thus those with out of wedlock births may be more likely to have small families.<p>It often feels like we as a society have sort of entered into a weird territory with a lot of these liberal changes.  The societal structures that have worked in the past, while you may not like them, did work.  We have sort of removed a lot of that previously structure that worked, for logical reasons of course, but we haven&#x27;t really replaced it with structures that work equally well. Thus we have the very low fertility rate we have now.<p>The problem with social progress is that we do not really do it understanding the consequences long term.  And then we run into these issues.  I am not sure we can fix the problems these changes have brought with them faster than the demographic advantage can switch to those still are religious&#x2F;conservatives who do not have similar dropping fertility rates.<p>Fertility wins in the end, not anything we write or reason about abstractly, no matter how logical or elegant those arguments may be.<p>I think because fertility wins in the end, political philosophies that are in competition over the long-term (decades or longer), need to take that into account, or they lose by default as their adherents decrease.