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.