Via Free Exchange, the Washington Post reports that fertility rates actually start to rise as economies become a very highly developed. A notable exception being, of course, Japan.

I wonder how this squares with Bryan Caplan’s discovery that in wedlock births in the US and Japan are roughly the same. The US simply has more out of wedlock births.

Looking only at most developed countries, the lowest fertility rates correspond to my prejudices about the most traditionalist societies. That is, I imagine Japan and to a lesser extent Italy to be societies in which out of wedlock pregnancies would suffer more scorn. I have absolutely no data to back that up, however.