The Western world decided to shift from a growth system, where women bear and raise children and the able bodied population slowly increases, to a system where the women enter the work force and children are few in number. If you measure it in years, they did this quite a long time ago. If you measure it in generations, it's only been a couple.
This had the consequence of dramatically reducing the number of "dependents" and increasing the percentage of people doing "productive work" as an economist would measure it. But, that only lasts till the generation that started the ball rolling retire and become dependents themselves. Then the spiral to oblivion starts, and you can't reverse it without death and destruction.
The women in the work force are no longer "bonus productivity", now they're essential resources to care for the dependent elderly. You can't even acknowledge and the situation and correct it at this point, unless you want to leave your senior citizens to die of neglect. But the longer it continues, the worse it gets, until eventually the people are so few in number that economies of scale break down and we regress to the lifestyle of primitives.
You don't need to have a PhD in Mathematics to understand this. Just a willingness to accept that everything you've been raised to believe was wrong.
Everything is in decline. It's going to continue this way for the rest of our lives. People will continue to refuse to accept the truth of what I've just said, and they'll point at a million different symptoms and call them causes, and we will go into further and further into decline until it collapses. Only at that point will there be people ready to start over.
I had a brief period in my youth where I worked as a life insurance agent, and got to see the proprietary data that makes up their actuary tables of life and death. I saw all this coming, spent my whole life trying to oppose it because I care too much about people to just ignore it, but all I ever got was sophistry, anger and people telling me how intolerant and stupid I was. But everything I saw has come to pass, and this is just another part of it.
Sometimes being a visionary means begging your foolish fellows to stop dancing and get the fuck off the train tracks, and getting run down by the train because you don't have the heart to let go.
I pity the younger generation. At least I got to spend the first half of my life in the shiny happy part. You young guys are in for a rough life. You get to try to measure up to a time of abundance that you will never experience for yourselves, and fail. That it will make it all the more painful, I expect.