Your argument paints with a very wide brush, which is likely the source of the downvotes. That said, I do think you're touching upon a decent theory whether you realize it or not:
What if the real issue isn't merely environmental or economic in nature, but simply the species itself pulling back on births because we feel we have too many people already? Maybe there's enough ongoing crises throughout the world (that we're increasingly aware of thanks to global media) that, internally, our drive is to reduce the population naturally through attrition? It could be to conserve resources, or until the environment supports such rapid growth again, or something else entirely, but it's plausible that the human organism is self-evaluating its current population numbers and deciding that, just like Big Capital is doing via layoffs, we can do the same with less people.
Just something to chew on.
I don’t think I would anthropomorphize the whole species like that, but I actually think some people are consciously pulling back for that exact “we have too many people already” reason. I believe it to be wildly misguided though. I think it’s a sick mind that perceives their own species as an invasive pest to be exterminated. Humans can be bad and they can be good. If you are dismayed, as I am, at how bad the bad people can be, I would argue that all the good people laying down and dying (either immediately or through voluntary infertility) does not solve that problem. If anything, that might increase the bad-to-good ratio. The actual fixes for that are MUCH harder: 1. Have more kids and raise them to know right from wrong. 2. Have a positive impact on the world to promote doing what’s right.
For instance, Fred Rogers did more for improving the world than 10,000,000 people guiltily refusing to have kids would have.
So did Mother Teresa, who, through her work, both increased the population and inspired others to do good.
Sounds like anthropomorphism of species/evolution.
Is consciousness necessarily being implied here? That sort of reflective decision making can be indirectly influenced by what we might consider economics, but economics is fundamentally a process of allocating scarce resources across non-scarce desires. Markets represent a form of collective intelligence, even without necessarily representing sentience.
Individual families making rational economic decisions about child-rearing costs, when aggregated across millions of families, could produce patterns that look like species-level decision-making without requiring any actual species-level consciousness.