Can any anthropologists answer this: have there been other human cultures that die out due to a lack of desire to procreate, or is this a new development?
Do you have evidence of a < 2.0 fertility rate reversing itself in human cultures?
But it wasn’t too long ago that people were afraid of exponential population growth leading to wars and suffering and the end of civilization.
Now the global population has started to stabilize and concerns have shifted toward shrinking populations in developed countries. I don’t pretend to know how things will end up, but it’s not a stretch to imagine scenarios where the populations in developed countries could stop shrinking and stabilize.
I think it's a little premature to assume that the population of Japan is going to die out. One of the points mentioned is that few Japanese women have children out of wedlock - I imagine this will change as time moves on and fewer couples marry, similar to other countries.
However, I think the main challenge with posing the question "have there been other human cultures that die out due to a lack of desire to procreate" is that culture is quite an ephemeral thing - what would it mean to die out?
As an aside, is strawman a verb these days? Language is hard to keep up with.
True, but the fact remains that the fertility rate is below the population replacement rate as well.