From the comments of the article:<p>> A possible link would be that more progressive countries have more immigrants from places with higher fertility rates, and these immigrants are the ones pushing the TFR up.<p>Seems to me that this factor, when you can bring yourself to ignore the controversy of implied adjacent ideas, is one that can't be ignored if we want to understand the dynamics of culture, economics and fertility. To say that a liberal culture has a higher fertility rate is to ignore that liberal cultures often import populations from very conservative cultures. It's possible that the cultural differences between the European populations are negligible that if immigrant fertility were taken into account the line of best fit in these graphs would be flat. Or they could be inverse, or similar, we just don't know. But to ignore the possible effect is to not seriously strive to understand this dynamic.
I was disappointed that the author hadn't done a literature review, even a basic one. Perhaps they're an expert and didn't see the need, but they didn't cite anything or provide any further reading.<p>And it's not like this subject isn't researched.<p>There's so much [1] [2] that a literature review might be a really good place to start.<p>[1] <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=birthrate&btnG=" rel="nofollow">https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=birt...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://ideas.repec.org/cgi-bin/htsearch?form=extended&wm=wrd&dt=range&ul=&q=birthrate&cmd=Search%21&wf=4BFF&s=R&db=&de=" rel="nofollow">https://ideas.repec.org/cgi-bin/htsearch?form=extended&wm=wr...</a><p>A further article, without using data to demonstrate normative hypotheses but also with visualisations, is this: [3]<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate?source=content_type%3Areact%7Cfirst_level_url%3Aarticle%7Csection%3Amain_content%7Cbutton%3Abody_link">https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate?source=content_typ...</a>
I would be really surprised if it's just one core issue to point at, there's a ludicrously long list of perfectly reasonable factors that all do their part. These graphs barely show any correlation at all, much less any causation.
See also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory</a><p>(compare "The Sow & The Lioness")<p>It is much easier to argue that <i>H sapiens</i> is a K-selected species, than that we ought be an r-selected species.