The Population Sink Philip Longman and the decline of populations.
by Jonathan V. Last
06/07/2006

PHILLIP LONGMAN is the most important man you've never heard of in Washington.
A senior fellow at the liberal New America Foundation, Longman specializes in demography. If you're a romantic, demography is the science of love, writ large. If you're a cynic, it is the sausage factory of civilization. Whatever your disposition, demography is, if not destiny, then a subject of paramount importance. In the long run, no weapon, no technology, no economic system is more powerful.

Longman has spent many years studying demographic trends, and the conclusions are unsettling. As he writes in his 2004 book, The Empty Cradle, birthrates in America and around the world are declining beneath sustainability; population growth is slowing and, unless the trends of the last 200 years change, will soon bring about population decline--and with it, potential shifts in global prosperity and power.

Forget domestic politics and international relations: Fertility is the thing. As Longman explains, it's the grand unified theory of everything. As fertility rates decline, populations, then economies, then military power, then world influence, diminish. the rest