Now the interesting thing: those countries also have rapidly declining birth rates. Birth rate decline is a global thing that knows no borders. Even in countries where kids are still seen as free labor, almost nobody is having the 12 kids that they used to.

Obviously not everyone has to, but many people find their meaning in life through raising their children.

Each of the three classes of reasons is important here. No one class is reason to ignore another. The environmental class is however the most important as its adverse effect lasts for the most number of generations.

If that were the case, this declining fertility rate would cluster around certain socioeconomic cohorts in ways we just don't see. The pattern I see is a more alarming one, where it follows more closely teenage suicide patterns in a contagion-oriented model. Even in those places in Africa where fertility remains high, it drops most sharply among those who are in contact the most with people from the west, and in proportion to the amount of contact.

When self-surveyed people say "it's the economy", they're being put on the spot to answer a question they've thought little about and don't even really know why. They grope for whatever answer makes them sound the least stupid.

>People dont want to have 2.2 children so we can even maintain replacement levels.

Likely, people want far more children than that, and do not know it. This is why the women who "do not want children" are the ones that have had 3 abortions these past 10 years despite the ease with which one might remain sexually active and yet not pregnant. They think they want one thing, and far more primitive parts of their brains/psychologies want something else. Why people hop from "relationship" to "relationship", because that's the impulse when mating was barren long ago... and they chalk it up to some personality incompatibility out of a magazine article.