Why can't societies recognize their worse problem?

Question

Only most Euro-cultures have stopped pumping out so many babies their economies eventually decline to famine unless they consume other species' and/or other people's lands.  In modern times they also consume other people's economies.  Ultimately those practices force war.

Spurts in technological advancement have rescued us many times by rapidly increasing resource access and product production.  However the spurts don't come consistently and each time they also rapidly escalate resource depletion.

Even the Euro-cultures who stopped overpopulating didn't do it to avoid the famines and wars they all suffered repetitively until they stopped overpopulating.  They coincidentally benefitted when they stopped to delay or avoid the lifestyle interference of children. Even so their economies are sucked away by the desperate cheap labor in societies who didn't stop overpopulating.

Is the recognition blinded by instinct and emotional drive to produce limitless relatives?  Are those subconscious drives fed by the need for reliable allies in people's push against each other for more resources their expanding numbers must have?

If so why do so few recognize the irony in that?  Please don't blame just religion, self-destructive pressure from earlier generations to produce offspring, or peer pressure to follow their lead into parenthood.  I saw all of that in cultures who stopped overpopulating but just the desire to continue their single or "DINK" (double income, no kids) lifestyle deflected all that.

My conclusion is the overpopulating cultures bow to the pressures because they so fear the thought of the famines and wars they create that they blunder right into those mindlessly.  Ironically they close their minds to the disasters that panic them and so run right into them blindly because they can't see them coming.  Instead they blame everyone who doesn't suffer with them.

Is my evaluation too simplistic or is that what actually happens?

who WAS #1? · Accepted Answer

Traditional agricultural societies saw children as an asset because it meant more work hands, the child mortality rate was fairly high and an extended family was everyone's retirement plan (not actually retirement, there was no such thing, but eventually old folks can't do hard labor any more).

Affluent societies view children not as an asset but as an expense so the birth rate goes down.

Unfortunately, the "replacement rate" is 2.1, but Europe, Japan, Russia (and except for the immigrant segment of our population) America, now enjoy a birth rate of about 1.1, which is extinction level.

Historically, the society with the highest birth rate wins, because they can (and have to) field armies.  Look at the consequences of China's "one child" policy.  something like 30 million men in their 20s know they will never have a wife or girlfriend because there just aren't enough women. Tell me this is not the makings of a land Army???  China would just love to rid itself of these highly motivated conquerors, 30 million is nothing compared with their 1.3 Billion population.

Japanese toy makers are now making dolls for what should have been grandparents who have no grandchildren.  Not enough kids there.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, were it not for Muslim immigration they would have full employment and be experiencing a severe labor shortage.  In USA the 40 million abortions we've had since 1974 just about equals the illegal alien population, mostly from Mexico where they tend to have a lot of kids (Catholic).

In 50 years Europe and Russia will be Muslim and USA will be speaking Spanish.  Assuming of course some seriously major wars don't make parts of the world uninhabitable. At least the 
Cold War was mostly pretty civilized.  Not so with the folks in the Middle East.

? · Answer

It's all about mOney

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Why can't societies recognize their worse problem?

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