WI: Western Birth Rate Didn't Drop Below Post WWII Baby Boom Rate

Computers are less advanced, but the computer tech of 1968 is more than enough for a vigorous space program if physical expansion of living space is what the society wants. An ongoing babyboom would tend to focus interest in that direction I think.

You're fantasizing again. What doomed the US space program is not that white people stopped having as many babies as you'd have liked. It's that the economics of space exploration are marginal, and those of space colonization completely impossible. A lot of features of the space program could have gone another way, leading to more exploration today - stuff like asteroid mining and more space stations in low Earth orbit - but none of that would've dropped the cost of building a single habitable Moon dome (or Mars dome, etc.) to reasonable levels. And even then, the dome would be for roving teams of astronauts, and not settlers - think something like the Hab in The Martian, but bigger.

Space is not an ocean, and the Moon, Mars, etc. are not 17c New England, where you can drop a few hundred settlers in an area and they'll take care of themselves. 21c society is more complex, to the point that you need hundreds of thousands of settlers at a time to maintain living standards. The technical work required to maintain the habitation modules requires specialized skills as well.

That's on the supply side. On the demand side, why? English settlement of the US was not motivated by Lebensraum. In the 17c, England's population didn't grow. The motivation was profit: colonies in the South exported agricultural goods to the metropole, and colonies in New England exported manufactured goods to the colonies in the South. Businessmen could and did fund colonization. In space, not only are we talking multiple tens of trillions of dollars for a viable colony, but also there wouldn't be any profit in it to whoever was expected to pony up the money.
 
Ah, you hit maturity just as the disorders of the '60's peaked, as stagflation started to bite hard, 'The Population Bomb' was a best seller and feminism was being hothouse forced grown by government and universities. The stagflation in particular made a working father and a stayathome mother with three or more kids difficult for most.

...except that stagflation began in 1970, when the TFR was already down to 2.5. In the 1960s, the TFR went down dramatically, in a period of rapid economic growth; in contrast, in the 1950s, growth was unusually weak by 20c standards.

Per Measuring Growth, US GDP per capita grew 3% per year in the 1960s, and 3.4% between 1960 and 1969, since 1970 was a recession year. The poverty rate went down from about 30% to 10%. In the 1950s, the poverty rate declined slowly, and GDP per capita grew 1.8% per year. 1.8% is respectable by post-1970 standards, but in the beginning of the decade the US was still recovering from the post-WW2 demobilization recession; peak-to-peak, growth was weaker - 0.9% from 1953 to 1960, or 0.4% from 1944 to 1960. To put things in perspective, peak-to-peak, the US grew 1.5% per year between 2000 and 2007, and 2.1% between 1969 and 1979.

Something similar can also be seen in other developed countries. Not the specifics - in many of these countries, the 1950s were the best decade, because of recovery from WW2 bombings - but the general observation that the end of the Baby Boom didn't really coincide with any recession. In France, TFR peaked in 1964, but then dropped rapidly, well before the end of the Trente Glorieuses. In Britain, ditto, except that there was nothing like the Trente Glorieuses or the German postwar miracle. In Japan, there was no baby boom at all: the prewar TFR was about 4, and after the war, it dropped from 4.5 in 1946 to 2 in 1957. Maybe it's those evil 1960s feminists who made Japanese men less virile in the 1950s... or maybe, just maybe, there is such a thing as the demographic transition.
 
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