> many places with low fertility rates are currently correcting for overly explosive growth experienced in recent history

Huh? Korea is "correcting" for past growth by having 0.8 children per woman? i.e. less than half the replacement rate? Such a wild swing in fertility, when it swings below replacement, solves zero problems while creating existential ones, so I don't see how anyone can call it a 'correction' as though it is helping to 'balance out' something.

The West is literally killing itself off with this, not because it's necessarily so bad that we might simply have fewer people in a given country in 50 years, that certainly sounds fine if it the remaining population were still in a healthy ratio of young to old. But that's not how it works. Populations age of course, and fertility rates crashing the way they have means the 45-year-olds who are so plentiful today but had 0-1 kids will be 70 in 25 years and there will be almost no working people to pay for their expensive healthcare and living expenses.

And yes, the low fertility rates are caused by our 2-income-standard economic system + unaffordability (countries are doing nothing to support people at a healthy childbearing age to start families).

While women in other cultures, or women of 1950 may have felt they had no choice to have a career, women in the West today don't feel they even have a choice to even have kids, at 22, which physiologically is a great age to do it, or sometimes ever. Why? Because, for instance in the US, at 22 you likely have high 5-figures of student loan debt and shaky job prospects, zero guarantee of paid family leave (maybe a temporary pittance is provided in some states in some circumstances), and a one-income family is not able to compete for scarce expensive housing.

I'm not saying this is black and white, rather I'm saying that our enlightened Western system (A) has downsides too, (B) robs people of choice in another way, and (C) is so unsustainable that no matter what you think, our societies inevitably will fail - in large part because of this issue.

Here's a far better explained version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-gYFcVx-8Y