The critical factors behind this are women's education, their increasing role in the workplace, consumerism - here the friend, not the enemy of environmental progress - and consequent wider use of birth control.
I suspect this may be a key factor in much of this current problem - as in, consumerism can be viewed as a measuring system to determine a level of affluence sufficient to raise a population from poverty-level to productive-level, but is not in itself a philosophy or way of life, which to some extent it has become in the more affluent societies. We're meant to use it, not believe IN it. This has created a sort of log-jam where the affluent societies are often 'hogging the sofa' and indulging in pointless distraction, when we should really be (for example) preparing to construct moon colonies by now, and enabling the third world to occupy
our current position of 'consumerism' - so that when the moon colonies are finished, they'll be ready to start using them.
But we're too busy (for example) watching baking shows on TV, and indulging 'background piano music' every time something 'sad' is meant to be happening to us - or to someone else, ideally. And reaching for the smartphone every two minutes to illustrate
another conversation about - well, needing the smartphone. It's so distracting. We have to
want to leave this stuff behind ourselves for it all to move forward. There's been immense technological progress in affluent societies, but far less socio-economic progress, which seems to be tending toward a media/celebrity-driven culture, general levels of obesity, depression, anxiety for the future, etc. in more affluent populations. Societies where populations age unevenly due to the lack of personal risk (adventure?), hence discouraging fresh couplings/births. There are as many prescriptions for anti-depressants in Britain as there are people, and we're not all on anti-depressants, which means some (hopefully mostly older adults!) are on two or three different ones. Wild buzz...
And that mindset creates a tendency toward electing grumpy, paranoid and generally deceitful (and almost always male) political leaders who deliberately discourage forward-thinking members of the population from sticking their heads over the parapet - or from creating associations with like-minded populations elsewhere. And who encourage safety-first nostalgia as a way of life, rather than something to be treasured and filed for reference. Most of the major countries of the world are currently run by these assholes, kept in power by their 'safety-conscious' believers - and usually wielding a big stick for the non-believers. A few countries are run by intelligent, personable women, and seem to be doing quite well as a result. Makes you think.
However, China does teach moon-lander training as part of its general education programme, in the form of video games for four year-olds, as they anticipate by the time they reach adulthood they will have a job to do in that business. We don't really think like that yet, but we
should have been doing it since 1969. There's nothing special about China, they just haven't had consumerism as a way of life as long as we have. We really do need to knuckle down and get stuck into the important stuff now. Maybe the BBC should make a new version of "Why Don't You...?" for adults?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FQktsKvXcg