That's survivorship bias. You have eliminated from the sample all the people who wanted to have kid and already have one. It's unsurprising that people who don't want kids and will never have some are overly represented in the new sample.
I don't think there is survivorship bias here. If you simply track the percentage of people having children over their lifetime you can build stats like this as a type of ground truth in relation to census data etc.
The issue is not the veracity of the statistics. The statistic is correct (I have never implied otherwise by the way - no idea why I'm downvoted so much as what I wrote is perfectly true, the proportion of people who don't want kids is higher once you remove people who already had kids).
The issue is in the interpretation. Your sampling is biased so the immediate conclusion is false. If you want kids and are over 30, your chances are better than 50%.
Related to this, the delta between those who want kids but will end up never having them is about 15% at the moment, which is a surprisingly large % of the population. You aren’t guaranteed what you want, especially when it comes to kids.
The society that figures out how to properly overlap child rearing in an educational environment will survive. I’m fascinated with how much the world is going to change in the next century with most of the world set to shrink and be dominated by the elderly.
I have been think about this also. I am about to turn 50 in six months, and probably will not have the opportunity to have children (I am not dating 20-30 year olds).
I see more of the population in the US going the way of Asian cultures (I am first generation Indian) where you have multi generational house holds being more common. It is going to be a painful cultural shift, especially for the highly individualistic American culture - but that is the only way I see future generations surviving.
For one, welfare and retirement programs won't work. Those require at least an equal replacement population. Either the younger generation will be paying a lot more in with no return in later life, or they just won't be able to support the system.
That's only because Japan doesn't want to bring in immigrants. There isn't a problem in countries like the US that have always been based on a culture of immigration.
