@cremieuxrecueil: Today's total fertility rates ...

Today's total fertility rates look very worrisome.

Since people today are delaying fertility more and more, they look worse than eventual, completed fertility rate.

This delay–a tempo effect–really only becomes worrying when it translates to health problems or a decline in completed fertility–a quantum effect.

In several countries, completed fertility is stable despite generally falling TFRs.

A really wonderful thing is that you can make likely accurate projections about future completed fertility levels.

In the case of Sweden, here's how @Scientific_Bird's projections look:

Doing this for the western Mediterranean nations, the projections are actually quite... happy!

It seems they're likely to have stable fertility in the near future.

The levels could still serve to be higher, and there's a lot we can do to make that happen.

But stabilization is still something to cheer about when the default assumption is universal decline.

And there *are* areas that even this optimistic method shows to be in free-fall:

If you want to learn more about this, I highly recommend reading the piece these charts came from, here: inquisitivebird.xyz/p/cohort-ferti…

And for a case where tempo led to a quantum decline, see: demographic-research.org/articles/volum…