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Notes -
I think it's pretty simple.
My hypothesis: TFR and current economic projections on the value of a future human are linked.
When TFR is 2.0, it means today's projection of the total projected economic productivity over the average future citizen's life is zero.
A TFR under that means it's negative (population is in surplus), a TFR over that means it's positive (population is in shortage).
Market distortions can affect this, especially when the sum of people born in positive-value conditions attains more political power than the sum of those who were born into eras of zero or negative value, because they will always inherently believe those conditions exist (which is generally how you get Great Replacement-ism).
As for why the collapse in future human value is more pronounced outside the modern West? Well, countries that were extremely late to the industrialization party- South Korea being the standout example at a TFR of 0.7- never enjoyed the kind of automation-induced economic boom in the '50s-'70s. Remember, that was back when
AImechanization wasn't yet good enough to do all the work itself; operators were not only required, but paid handsomely.Once you hit the '80s and '90s, automation gets so good that the demand for unskilled operators ends completely in favor of its new manifestation, robotics- but in countries that were just industrializing at that time, that demand never materialized in the first place (they mostly skipped straight to the advanced implementation). They never really had a legacy economy full of rich former operators to mine, either (which is also part of why Europe is also not as affected as they should be) so there's no other residual economic value to be captured.
What the total value of a future human being is depends also on culture; again, South Korea (and India) being two standout examples of that given how they treat their kids. Education at that intensity is entirely worthless, yet it must be conducted precisely because it's a ritual sacrifice of child [and an increasing portion of young adult] life that legitimizes the society's choice to gradually wind the overpopulation down non-violently (for the alternative is 'you get a good 20 years of early life, then you go to war and die'). [This is the future of all societies where enough humans exist that automation/State capacity can be leveraged to consume the totality of a human's life as a sacrifice for "not being killed in war as the ultimate price of economic uselessness"- Ingsoc being the best fictional example.]
Otherwise, you end up like Europe in the early 20th century where you set up the Fields of Ritual Suicide in scenic northern France and order every man you can get your hands on straight into the machine guns. Or, once automation (and being outcompeted for 10 years due to neighboring countries that could afford to embrace it) does wreck your society as well as reparations imposed for killing more of your own men, you proceed to declare yourself the Master Race and as such decide to depopulate the nations to your East to punt on your current/eventual overpopulation.
And now there's even more advanced automation: though the short-term effects remain to be seen as increasing or decreasing the value of a human being, the long-term effects are clear that it will decrease. This is a problem that's here to stay (and not engaging with it leads to destruction as soon as a neighboring country decides it has a population problem that you or your land could conveniently solve; Butlerian Jihad might be topical, but is ultimately an isolated demand for rigor if you think about it for more than 5 seconds).
Im going to push back on Asian education being a sacrifice, I’d say it’s more like tryouts. You have limited slots of good-enough jobs for a huge population, so you need to sort the population so that if there are maybe a million really good jobs, 5 million decent jobs, another 10 million good-enough jobs, and a population of 50 million, the population has to be sorted, and the education system is probably the best place to do th3 sorting. Given that the results will be life long, people push educational systems to their logical limit.
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