Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.
I have a theory that I haven't found expounded before. It came from a combination of travel through 60+ countries, living and working and interacting with local people on a pretty intimate level sometimes, and study of <i>lots</i> of history.<p>It's going to be controversial and maybe even shocking, so brace yourself for a moment before reacting please.<p>I think peaceful societies self-destruct.<p>With a few notable exceptions that require a geography suitable to isolationism, long term peace has historically been achieved through your country or one of your ally's having military supremacy over the rest of your neighbors.<p>Obviously, diplomacy can keep the peace for long periods of time, even human lifetimes, but eventually incidents happen when there's a hothead in one government, and then that's when the military supremacy determines whether you get attacked or not.<p>Anyways, I've found the more a country renounces war and gets further away from it, the more birth rates go down. You get an explosion of commerce and art for ~30 to ~70 years, and then the society self-destructs.<p>No longer forced to confront mortality and with no externally unifying cause, people start living for luxury, pleasure, and consumption. They stop having children. Birth rates fall off.<p>Eventually, this destroys a country's economy, the military supremacy fades, and one of their neighbors comes in and cleans house, and the cycle begins anew.<p>This has happened many times through history. It's happening in Japan right now. If I became an advisor to anyone in the Japanese government, I'd advocate two things as chief priorities - (1) exceedingly good relations with China, and (2) re-militarize.<p>Then join the next war they can on America's or China's side. Combined with some standard messages of nationalism/strength/growth/unity, birth rates would almost certainly increase.