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The quality change is that, on average, parents are caring for children as never before and that children no longer serve the needs of parents and the family – rather, it's the other way around.

Children are not expected to become herders at the age of six or toil in a mine or on a boat. At that age, they need to go to school for 10-20 years. This was a rare privilege until mass education became the norm after the end of the 19th century.

The world came to believe that investing in mass education had much higher returns than sending most of its children to work at 5 or 6. Mass education also meant better health care for children; they can't study if they are unwell.

With fewer children, parents' affection and dedication are more concentrated: if you have a couple of kids, it's different from having half a dozen or more. It has changed everything in the parent-child relationship. Children are an expensive and risky investment for families and society.

Therefore, a family or even a society can't have too many children. There are still many children in places where there's a strong religious drive or where they do not need investment.

For the rest of the people, children are a costly concentration of affection, which (because of their nature) cannot be wasted, and thus one cannot have too many of them. Even wars, a constant drain of blood and lives throughout human history, now need, in general, fewer people – with less carnage fewer children are sacrificed at the altar of death and glory.

Short of a nuclear apocalypse, wars now aim at destroying a country's infrastructure and crippling its economy, with warfare flying on the blades of AI-driven drones or cyberattacks.