Anecdotally, this is directly correlated to the price of real-estate, and other parts of the world are only now catching up to Japan in this regards.

A lot of people are looking at the utter destruction of freedom that raising a family is today, and choosing not to. It's not just the price of real estate, it's inflation too. Roll into that the lack of job security and negative real interest rates and it's no wonder people can't think about a future.

One of the most basic needs when planning for a future is the prospect that the future will be better than the past. It's now very difficult to arrange that independently of constant advancement at work and constant advancement at work requires tremendous amounts of effort.

People are getting squeezed from both sides. I feel this myself, and I'm doing quite well statistically; white, male, educated, highly skilled and gainfully employed.

You people are forgetting feminism.

It has lots to do with it.

Brazil for example has PLENTY of space and cheap places to live (unless you want to live in São Paulo... like where I am now, the prices here ARE fucked up)

Yet marriages are going down to the point of scare the government too.

The reason for it is simple (there has been lots of research, not only here, but on other countries with declining births to dangerous levels): women prefer their careers to motherhood...

Even the UN gender economic report, state that it thinks is a good thing women have less kids because they can get richer (yes, that is written in the report, specifically, the report consider that countries where women have less than 3 kids, are countries that are awesome because they are reaching gender equality, since women with less kids can work more)

For men, it is the invention of no-fault divorce, that keeps marriage pointless (the point of marriage historically, in cultures where divorce was forbidden by law or by custom or by religion, was to force women stay in the marriage, and indeed in countries with no-fault divorce, no matter where, they keep finding that 70% of the divorces with no reason where started by women)

I wonder if they ACTUALLY prefer careers or if they THINK they do and thus never try. Remember that it's at least an 18 year commitment (probably longer) so that if you've got any doubts it's really easy to talk yourself out of it.

Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that women have any societal obligations.

But given that we're all here today we can infer historically that women (as a whole) have liked having children at least some amount. Did they never ACTUALLY like it but that was their only choice? Or do they (again as a whole) enjoy motherhood but socioeconomic life is now so treacherous that motherhood is a luxury few can afford? Perhaps something else entirely from the false dichotomy I've suggested?

EDIT: I've accepted your premise at face value, but I'm not sure I should. I don't know how to properly caveat this comment.

This is not fully clear yet, as we need more.20 years or so in this situation to be sure, but seemly women are being convinced that they want careers, and they regret it later... Right now the numbers of 50 year old childless women due to feminism is still low, but many of those few are drifting to be against feminism.instead and attempt to convince younger women to not repeat their mistakes. Mostly because when you are a 50 year old childless rich women, you realize that now you still have 30 years to live, nothing to do, and few people to love and care for you.

Since when does feminism promote childlessness?

It promotes the emancipation of women. When men care about children as much, there is no problem in having kids and a career for women (and men).

Feminism is about empowerment and choices. Being empowered to choose not to get married and have kids as I read it, considering that in the Western world that was "a woman's role" for probably centuries. At least as long as we've had patriarchy, which is quite a while.

Once women have the freedom to choose not to get married, have kids, etc it seems likely that some choose not to and thus the rise of feminism is roughly correlated with a decline in birthrates.

I've tidied this up in a nice little causal package but it's quite likely not so clear cut. But it certainly does seem that way at a glance. Which is why the notion gets such good traction amongst some.

Example of Feminism mixed with childlessness:

The UN report on gender equality in economy, writes explictly that countries where women have fertility of less than 3 is good, because research shows that women with high education has few kids, and thus it concludes that a country with not much kids mean that country has educated women, that from the point of the view of the report is a good thing.

I'm pretty skeptical of your claim that the point of marriage historically was to force women to stay in the marriage. Evolutionary sociobiology holds the opposite: that marriage evolved to get men to stick around. A woman already has an evolutionary incentive to provide for her offspring: she's invested far more in them (having provided the egg and nurtured them inside her for 9 months) than her partner has. A man's evolutionary incentive is to spread his seed across more women, because he can have many children while his wife can only have one per year. But since society benefits from not having all the violence and uncertainty that results from men porking each others' wives and being unsure whether the children they were raising were actually their own children, marriage evolved.

If your "70% of no-fault divorces were started by women" statistic holds true, it could be because the greater economic power wielded by men made them pretty shitty husbands, and so when the opportunity arose, their wives divorced them.

Women are hipergamous, they stay only with one person at time, but they switch to what they perceive as better ones. Most divorces are early in the marriage, when the woman is still young enough to have her first kids, or more kids beyond her first or second kid, and thus they can still find another man. Also there is research that found out that divorce rates drop when a woman has male children ( but not female, and noone knows why )

Maybe they have too many electronic substitutes. There's nothing in the human makeup that says "will procreate even in the presence of unlimited sexual gratification elsewhere". Its certainly something to be studied and understood.

I think it's a bigger more existential problem that young people these days have.

I am definitely more interested in Pokemon.