[banannaise]

> Wealth: Some say that even though, in the last few centuries, fertility has been falling with increasing wealth, that switches to fertility increasing with more wealth at a sufficiently high wealth level.

Here we go again, confusing national wealth with personal wealth. The core problem is that wealthy nations have a dramatically increasing number of people just scraping by - such that they cannot afford kids and/or do not have the leftover time and effort available to raise them. Tack on the loss of tight communities (with collective childcare support) and you have a recipe for a lot of people saying "this isn't realistic for me/us".