Not an anthropologist, but from my readings of Roman history, the Roman aristocracy stopped having as many children as they had before to the point that Augustus (if memory serves) made achieving political office easier for those who had kids. Didn't make a difference.

We are the first culture with birth control, this is the most significant change.

I disagree. People have less sex in our society for about the same reasons they don't have kids. Contraception makes no difference when men and women don't bother to date each other.

Has Japanese culture died out already? A trend does not equal actually dying out.

Well they are on track to have 50% of their population disappear in the next 40 years and a lot of economic upsets because of it. The fact they are isolated does protect against that, but presents other complications.

That’s what I meant by “trend”. 40 years is a long time and recently, fertility rates have frequently changed on shorter timescales.

Indeed, fertility rates can change rapidly. However it's foolish to simply claim it can change so it will. If the current trend continues the Japanese people and culture will be lost to time.

>A trend does not equal actually dying out.

Do you have evidence of a < 2.0 fertility rate reversing itself in human cultures?

I don’t.

But it wasn’t too long ago that people were afraid of exponential population growth leading to wars and suffering and the end of civilization.

Now the global population has started to stabilize and concerns have shifted toward shrinking populations in developed countries. I don’t pretend to know how things will end up, but it’s not a stretch to imagine scenarios where the populations in developed countries could stop shrinking and stabilize.

Suicide by Culture http://250bpm.com/blog:113

Procreation isn't limited to marriage.

Please don't strawman me by suggesting that I'm saying only married people have children. The article also talks about the lack of desire to have children due to the desire for independence, and talks about how it's also a factor in the lack of desire for marriage.

I simply misunderstood what you were saying - it seemed quite a non-sequitur from the main point of the article.

I think it's a little premature to assume that the population of Japan is going to die out. One of the points mentioned is that few Japanese women have children out of wedlock - I imagine this will change as time moves on and fewer couples marry, similar to other countries.

However, I think the main challenge with posing the question "have there been other human cultures that die out due to a lack of desire to procreate" is that culture is quite an ephemeral thing - what would it mean to die out?

As an aside, is strawman a verb these days? Language is hard to keep up with.

I see what you mean. Maybe my question does have a hidden assumption that it is even possible for a culture to die out from a lack of procreation. I'm just trying to better understand the problem... sub-replacement fertility rates seems to be a new development, and nobody seems to know how it plays out in the long run in the modern world.

A 'culture' can die by being replaced by another culture. Of course the most common means of death to a culture is loss of material resources leading to population decline, such as Easter island.

> Procreation isn't limited to marriage.

True, but the fact remains that the fertility rate is below the population replacement rate as well.