People have many kids when their life is unstable. That's why improving quality of life across the world is how it balances out?

I don't know that the cause of reduced fertility is prosperity. It might even be the other way around: as population growth decreases people have more because less people to split the wealth with. Our father's dug the gold from the ground and only had 1 child between them. It's probably a bit of both, when you're prosperous you have more to lose by feeding hungry babies.

But it most certainly doesn't balance out. Either a population grows or it shrinks, when a population grows it can produce more but there are more to feed, when it shrinks it ages, at first you have prosperity from that but eventually you wind up poor and old.

> Turns out, when women have the option to turn off their reproductive capacity, people opt for "hmmm nows not a good time I think I'll do it later" often enough that the population goes extinct.

Or we have a society and an economic system designed to push women into the workforce and makes having children an expensive luxury good? That is a policy decision that can be changed. If it were economically beneficial for a woman to have two to four kids instead of grinding 40-50 hour weeks in the office, a lot of women would reevaluate their choices.

And it's much better for us to figure out a sustainable solution now than to wait a generation or two for the world to have a general fertility crisis. Right now it is localized to first-world countries, so we have some time to figure out a solution before things get really dire.

The problem isn't localized to first world countries anymore, the process in all countries has already begun and cannot be stopped. Almost every country on earth has a replacement level or below fertility rate and every single country has a fertility rate significantly lower than 30 years ago. A generation has already grown with the lower fertility rate, which means a generation is already locked in that will age out of the workforce with barely enough young people to replace their productivity. It's done.

There might not be a sustainable solution, besides a brave new world, but I personally would like to preserve human dignity. It appears that steady state population sizes are a rarity in the natural world and that almost all populations are chaotic and fluctuate. https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html

This. Main point here: "this is not at all the failure of the West/Libs/Rich people/democracy/Jews/whoever else you want to blame. it's everywhere. don't look for culprits: it's just the natural process of economic growth and productivity improvement".

Well, that and the hostile response by natives to large migration is rational, to be expected, is naturally occurring and cannot be stopped either, regardless of the fact that it is unavoidable.