I don’t doubt that TV played it’s part in distracting us. But until recently we also entertained ourselves. We sat out on steps, played card games with neighbors, had people over for chess games or went out to the basketball court to playing under artificial lights. In all of these there were opportunities to engage in shennanigans, and people often did.

But then other factors were in play. The first was that children were social security. Just recently the mother of a friend who is gainfully employed in the Philippines , was a former undersecretary of natural resources who owns a condo and an expensive car lamented that her son had no children. “Who will take care of you in your old age?” she asked. Children were security.

With the advent of the welfare state or its equivalence in pensions, a lot of the incentive to have children went away. The other factor is the opportunity cost of having kids. The job of raising kids became expensive in reputational terms for women (“I am just a housewife”) and because it became so elaborate. You just couldn’t leave the kids to run around the neighborhood before dinner any more.

Now there may be other factors, but the fact remains that there is a strong correlation between welfare states and demographic distortion. Even China couldn’t stay out of the family. Their one-child family policy will have catastrophic results.

It is not that socialism per se causes a collapsing demography. That route can be accessed by other paths. But the policies and ethos of socialism tends to produce societies in which the future is devalued. One other data point. Nearly all socialist countries are environmental catastrophes. Eastern Europe produced so much pollution that merely switching over to capitalism gave them environmental credits for decades. North Korea is denuded, etc etc. Show me a socialist country and I’ll show you an environmental disaster.

And why? Because socialist incentives cannot reflect, both in natural resource economies or human economies, the correct discount value. It gets its price signals from central planning. Or it uses central planning to distort market signals. So the vanishing future is in essence a discount rate problem, whether that is reflected in deficit financing or a collapsing demography.