One part of this came up at the end of the article, namely that increased childhood survival rate leads to decreasing number of births. It makes a lot of sense to me that this would correlate with overall improvements of living standards.
If you want to have a family four children, I'd think it's pretty universally agreed that it's better if you only have to give birth four times to do it than five, because all four babies survive childhood.
That doesn't negate that there are other factors, especially in countries that already have low birth rates and high childhood survival rates. It was just a factor I hadn't paid much attention to before or heard people mentioning very often.
In theory it would make sense that fertility falls a bit with lower childhood mortality, but your explanation doesn't explain the data that lower childhood mortality is associated with fewer surviving children.
If you want to have a family four children, I'd think it's pretty universally agreed that it's better if you only have to give birth four times to do it than five, because all four babies survive childhood.
That doesn't negate that there are other factors, especially in countries that already have low birth rates and high childhood survival rates. It was just a factor I hadn't paid much attention to before or heard people mentioning very often.