Thanks for the response, Nell, your second point is spot on. All developed nations need to come up with more child friendly policies, and it's not just about childcare and family leave along with supporting public schools, it is more than that.

For example, the UK has many of them including free healthcare, as do places like Canada, and Australia, and New Zealand, and some Scandinavian countries are well ahead on all these fronts, but they don't make that much of a difference. The problem does all stem from the fact that we are not adapting properly to technology and the rapid nature of its advancement.

For example, it's well known that high levels of stress in a society put people off having children, the reality is the developed world is a harbinger for high stress environments mainly due to constant change.

It seems the trend stems from technological advancement, especially of the rapid kind. Such advancement creates instability because it means people are constantly having to change to keep up. We need to find a way to better help people adapt to such a world of constant change born through rapid technological advancement.

How we do this is another question but it is imperative that we do it because the fact that we have such high levels of mental health problems across developed societies needs to be addressed.

For example, it beggars belief that people who live in the developed world have substantially more mental health problems than those who live in the developing world's. That reality tells us that something is going wrong with the developed world model and we need to fix it.

But again, the problem stems from society's inability to manage a constantly changing environment. Humans are simply not used to it, normally when change comes along, it happens in a small way, people adapt to it over a long time, and so there is stability. Now change happens on a monthly basis.

What we need are policies that help people cope with this reality. So, what we need is to break the trend between technological advancement and not just cost of living, but high stress levels.

So yes, as a society, we do need more child friendly policies but those policies come from breaking the trend of constant rapid technological advancement constantly creating an ever more stressful environment where everything costs more – both financially and mentally. So, like said we need to break the trend of technology making it more costly – both in time and resources – to live and to raise children.

The best thing about it, if we break it for children, we break it for adults as well. So, if we can break the trend and start making technology create a society that works for us, rather than against us, it's a win for everybody.

In terms of immigration being the solution, on one level, it may seem this is a good idea but it's just pushing the problem down the can while holding back developing countries.

Here is why, firstly, once all nations reach developed status all nations will have this problem i.e. a rapidly dwindling birthrate due to the cost of having children. That would be very bad, yes, we do need to reduce population size to avoid global warming but slowly otherwise everything we have built will crumble because a developed model is like said in the post, basically a giant Ponzi scheme.

That means immigration as the solution is simply kicking the problem into the future rather than solving it in the present.

The second reason immigration is not the solution is because, firstly, if you take skilled workers from developing countries, you rob those countries of the very people who are most able to help those nations reach developed status. So, you are robbing those nations of the very people who can build those nations.

If you take unskilled workers or low skilled workers, you do one of two things, you take the most motivated low skilled workers again robbing a developing country of the very workforce that could help build it. Or you take people who inevitably are in poverty in one country and put them into poverty in another country which simply exacerbates the problem of hardship – it's surprising how many immigrants regret leaving simply because they find themselves in even greater poverty than they left behind.

The other big problem of taking skilled and motivated unskilled workers from developing nations, is if you rob such nations of their best workers you massively slow down their chances of reaching developed status. As developing nations are the nations fuelling the population boom, slowing down their ascent to developed status simply ensures that the world's population will continue to rise for longer.

Don't get me wrong, immigration is a brilliant thing and I am a big fan of it, but when people move it should be because they want to go to that country not because they want to escape the hardship of the country they are in. That's why it's imperative that we help developing countries reach developed status rather than pushing to try to take their skilled workers from them to solve our birthrate problems.

All in all, there are three big imperatives for this century, go green, help all nations reach developed status and break the trend between rapid technological development and the increased cost of living and having children. If we can manage all those three things, then the future will look good.