Right because jobs that paid a decent wage are gone and women have had to enter the workforce in oder to keep consumption expanding to prop up our ponzi form of capitalism.

We aren't have a lot of children because we've moved from an agrarian to a post-industrial economy, have postponed marriage and childbirth more than a decade, and have excellent birth control.

Right, children are a liability in a post-industrial economy just like you pointed out in the post. Women would have to be crazy to give up their prime earning years in oder to have children and risk abandonment by husbands who find a younger cuter model to fool around with leaving the woman to be scolded by the likes of people like you for not selecting the proper mate or earning more net income than you’d pay for child care, it’s more economically efficient to care for your own children.

Look, face it, consumer driven, jackpot capitalism makes having children a liability unless the society as a whole decides to pitch in and help care for them. So birthrates will decline and new markets will have to be found in oder to sell widgets. The post war success was driven by a lot of things but the demographics of the baby boom were a big influence.

I'm not sure what the evidence is of that. We've managed to go from an economy that employed virtually no married middle class women to one where the majority of them are employed in a matter of twenty-five years. We also absorb a huge number of immigrants.

We aren't have a lot of children because we've moved from an agrarian to a post-industrial economy, have postponed marriage and childbirth more than a decade, and have excellent birth control.

Moving on to gender differences in wages, why don't we also show graphs for the developed nations as well? I believe we would see a similar gender wage gap in our countries.

Women's rights & opportunities are important, but overall it makes much more sense to feed & educate all children of all societies. It also makes sense to judge their progress against our own, which is sometimes lacking.

Which is precisely why industrialized nations are declining in population. Right now we in the US are at below replacement level birth rates as are all industrial nations, because there simply are not enough jobs being produced by those economies to allow people to afford to have unsubsidized children. Japan is in crisis with regard to this (because they are extremely xeophobic)and the US is only treading water because of immigration.

I wonder who the hell we think we are going to sell those plasma TV's to in oder to sustain our economy which will implode with out growth?