The US birth rate began to drop in the 1960s. [0] At the time we were a more self-contained economy.
Since then, there are fewer births per capita, and we've opened up global markets for labor and resources.
If you have fewer people aging into markets for goods and services as time goes on, you have to monetize them more intensely in order to maintain revenues. At the same time, other markets (China, India, etc.) offered relatively-high GDP growth (and thus return on investment) compared to the US [1], since their labor costs are lower and the needs of then-developing nations were cheaper to meet.
The result is a worker that's expected to produce more profit to compete with those elsewhere, while also being more intensely monetized through their consumption habits. If they can't produce enough profit to compete with workers elsewhere, they just don't have the income necessary to be more intensely monetized, so their standard of living drops.
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The US birth rate began to drop in the 1960s. [0] At the time we were a more self-contained economy.
Since then, there are fewer births per capita, and we've opened up global markets for labor and resources.
If you have fewer people aging into markets for goods and services as time goes on, you have to monetize them more intensely in order to maintain revenues. At the same time, other markets (China, India, etc.) offered relatively-high GDP growth (and thus return on investment) compared to the US [1], since their labor costs are lower and the needs of then-developing nations were cheaper to meet.
The result is a worker that's expected to produce more profit to compete with those elsewhere, while also being more intensely monetized through their consumption habits. If they can't produce enough profit to compete with workers elsewhere, they just don't have the income necessary to be more intensely monetized, so their standard of living drops.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?name_...