It may cause a bit of economic hardship but reducing the population to environmentally sustainable levels is probably a good thing. Also having less children in the world for a generation or two may make it lot easier to end illiteracy and eradicate chronic poverty.
Of course it is possible that there maybe new technology that allows more efficient use of resources but currently it is not possible for 9 or 10 billion people to live comfortably on this planet.

In any case, Germany's officials are already complaining about the diminishing immigration. They also have the problem of "wrong" immigration, that is, Turkish illiterate and culturally ignorant migrants who only want to keep the profile low while enjoying the German state benefits for the poor. Germany wants to attract the "better" migrants, but there are so many obstacles and political minefields on the way to an immigration country that I don't think it will ever work out (think of it: want to go to Germany? Well: hmm. Speak German? No? Yes? You are fluent with an accent? Forget it. People with a foreign accent are labeled idiots in Germany).

This is likely to kill Germany in the long run.

America, on the contrary, has a growing population that (mostly) speak English. It might sound stupid, but it is a huge advantage. No, not Mandarin or anything else. People around the world learn English, and it is easier to achieve an acceptable level compared to German (or, even more funny, Dutch or - much worse - Mandarin).

That is a little but very important advantage that might save Americas butt.

However, nothing will work out as long as American politicians turn USA into EU and ruin the energy and the motivation of virtually everyone.

There is hope.

Aldous Huxley had the answer over 70 years ago. All that we need is a programme to introduce hatcheries for producing babies completely in-vitro and the problem will be solved. Huxley's vision of the future was remarkably prescient, so much so that many younger people would puzzle to understand why he regarded it as a dystopia.

Longman is ignoring multiple important factors and nursing bogus ideas to take an overly simplistic look at what is an incredibly complicated problem.

1. We don't have a desperate need for workers. There are probably 1 billion or more people on the planet right now for whom there is no real work. We used to think that was just countries like China, with its enormous agrarian population, but it is happening in industrialized countries like the United States, much to our surprise.

2. The planet is grossly overpopulated at 6 billion people and we need to see this as an opportunity to substantially reduce the population without resort to the traditional factors of war and disease. That is, assuming we really value life on the planet and don't want everyone living like the worst hardscrabble existence in Haiti.

3. Major shocks to the world economic and social system are in the pipeline, written about, but not really believed by most people. These are the end of cheap oil and global warming. One will affect the cost of making things and throwing things away and the other will cause major disruptions to coastal cities as sea level rises and as many mid-latitude crop growing regions become susceptible to drought.

As for me, I'm glad I won't be here in 50 years to likely be part of the suffering that is going to occur.

I've been reading Longman's books and articles for some time now, and as much as he would like to find a "third way" between low birth rates of the enlightened secular and the high birth rates of the unenlightened "talibanesque" religious, I think Longman himself would agree that sans a deep commitment to some sort of set of beliefs in which education is only of secondary value the religious folks will eventually win out via demography.

So far, there seems to be consensus that women can have a lot of education or a lot of children but not both. One always comes at the expense of another and for obvious reasons. So I think Longman's last attempt to "imagine a society in which parents get to keep more of the human capital they form by investing in their children" is more precisely an attempt to imagine a society in which economic productivity is not strongly tied to human reproduction.

I think Longman will end his life lamenting that no one, including himself and despite his best efforts, will have found an answer to this they considered satisfactory.

I think the message of incongruencies (sp ?) resulting from a reverse population trend is short-sighted.

Global coping of population rises and ample labor and economic divisions was suited to the reality of that time. If the population were to reverse trends and (hopefully) settle at a more ecologically sustainable level, what's to say that economic systems (labor force vs. senior social nets dynamics) and technology (innovations to allay physical laborious or undesireable tasks in case of a dearth of "cheap" labor , for example) won't evolve to adapt to the new reality ?

Meanwhile, it's clear to anyone rational that the challenges faced by an already over-populated world will only become worse if the arrow continually goes up. If living space and resource and infrastructure issues and financial and political inequalities that already exist haven't been addressed, how will more mouths to feed (regardless of the nuances) make it better ?

I have one major gripe with the article. "Traditional Values" is a poor "scare quote" word to use. For some, traditional values does not mean that "women have few economic and social options beyond the role of motherhood" but that the role of mother is actually valued. Talk to many women who have chosen to be stay- or work-at-home moms and you will see the derision and condescension they suffer. Western society does not really value children and so does not really value motherhood.

As to many of the comments here, they operate on the assumption that our current population is not ecologically sustainable. That is a premise that needs a *lot* of substantiation. It is especially hard to accept as a premise when we look at the appalling imbalance in consumption of natural resources in the world. The more logical conclusion is not that the world population is too high, but that parts of that population have a gluttonous appetite for the limited resources available. Therefore, the solution that more readily respects the inherent dignity of the human person is to fix the locust-like approach to consumption rather than to tell other people that they can't have kids.

I must say that, when I first read the heading of the article, I was happy that ageing finally receives greater attention even among audiences that haven’t really mentioned it in the past.

When reading the whole article, however, a couple of points struck me:
1) Are older people really a burden? – Where does this article mention older people’s contributions? Just think about the amount of informal care work done by older people, especially in environments that are faced with the HIV/AIDS pandemic. On helpage.org you will find various examples of older people that make a change and are huge assets to their families and whole societies.
2) Does getting older necessarily mean to get technologically illiterate? – Just take a look at The Grayest Generation Photos of a world going gray and you will notice that there are other examples, e.g. Japanese older people experiencing new technologies such as iPads. Maybe this is just about implementing new policies and adapting the work environment . Various psychological studies have shown that the decline everybody associates with ageing does not necessarily happen in all parts of our body. What for instance about experiences accumulated over a lifetime?
3) Does an older population lead to economic downturn because there are “fewer young adults [… and hence] fewer people needing to purchase new homes, new furniture…”? – Just type “Silver Economy” into Google and you will see business opportunities resulting from population ageing and ageing societies.

"...U.S. employers report it is nearly impossible to find the engineering talent they need, (yet) the unemployment rate among U.S. engineers remains extraordinarily high. The faster-evolving and more technologically sophisticated a society becomes, the more rapidly job skills -- and elderly workers, sadly -- become obsolete."

Nonsense. These companies _could_ simply hire experienced engineers and send them to college classes-on-the-web to learn the latest technologies. Employers simply want latest-tech experience without having to pay a premium for it.

As the population ages, it will become increasingly difficult for economically successful middle-aged men to make second marriages with young beautiful trophy wives. They make have to become more accepting of women who are not quite so young or so beautiful. (Alternatively, perhaps increasing sexual liberalization will allow lower-level alpha-males to share.)

Parents will probably feel that the threat to their children by sexual predators is increasing, as child molesters concentrate their efforts on a shrinking population of children.

Looking into the future is always difficult - those pesky people keep making changes that alter the outcomes.

That said, you point to many things to "think about" and that's the important thing in my book. We know what's happening but don't - even in the present - know just what to do about it. Furthermore, opinions abound all along the political spectrum.

So I thank you for your well presented article, and urge others to read it. If they have an "open framing" mentality, it might alter their current thinking and give new dimensions to their perspective.

And while we can point to the "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" and those of others, there is no way we can account for those pesky people in the future who WILL change everything.

You offered a third way?
Can we offer a fourth ?
Imagine a society where we invest in older people. Where healthy older people work for as long as they are able in appropriate work - thereby contributing to society as taxpayers and consumers (buying smaller houses and more appropriate furniture!) and investing in thier grandchildren education. Imagine a society where we see older people as an asset not a burden. This isnt blue-skies thinking, or even grey skies thinking, it's a reality we are going to have to create in order to make future ageing populations live in dignity and security. The future is grey/gray, but it most certainly does not need to be depressing.

There are enough people, indeed, too many already. Halving the population in a century might enable us to avoid catastrophic collapse due to resource depletion and destruction of the plants, animals, land, water and air that sustain us.

The "dependency burden" is the number of people who can't work (not yet, not still or not ever) and depend on others to support them. Children, disabled adults, debilitated elders are all part of the dependency burden. They are preparing for the future, sharing their humanity, and doing what they can to participate--but the tragedy of bad healtlh care and bad personal habits gives us too many years of need for material, financial and personal assistance. Let's look to our examples of healthy and productive aging, and help everyone to care for themselves and others until the last year or so of life.

STOP trying to manipulate PEOPLE!!!! LEAVE US ALONE to have or Not have babies. IF scientist and man would stop dictating and calculating and oppinionateing and forceing people, the wonderful GOD would be our guide to population.
GOD's hand will do the manipulation, MAN just needs to trust in GOD.

"This explains such paradoxes as the fact that U.S. employers report it is nearly impossible to find the engineering talent they need, while the unemployment rate among U.S. engineers remains extraordinarily high."

Oh please, this is about HB1 visa abusing lawyers and foreign labor undercutting locals, and its happening to engineers all over the western world.

This is a pretty good article, and kudos to the author for writing it. However, instead of dismissing an older and more enlightened conception of fertility, sexuality, and children as "the Taliban road," perhaps it is time for the author and others posting on this website to reconsider their assumptions.

I find it astounding that the author draws no links between what this article details and the contraceptive and anti-natal attitudes that have gripped the post-Western world and all those areas under its influence, and have held it for the better part of a century. Indeed, these attitudes are anti-woman, properly understood.

Russia is a great example of what I'm talking about. I read within the last few years of programs being promoted in that country to encourage people to have children, because it was understood that Russia as a nation was dying due to well-below replacement level birth-rates. And the origin of these low birth-rates? The communist government which ruled over it for 80 years, give or take, of course. Under this regime, abortion was promoted as "freeing" women from oppression and so forth. And where do you find this sort of thinking in the post-Western world? Why, in the vast majority of feminist thought, which originated in Marxist ideology. Hmmm... Understood: this is not the sole cause, but it is something to consider, isn't it?

In addition, the statement that "women [would] have few economic and social options beyond the role of motherhood" reveals another bad assumption about human life: that men and women are interchangeable in every facet of society, and if they are not, something is wrong which must be corrected through intervention. All interventions, direct and indirect, by powers within the West into destroying protections of a sound Christian and Natural Law-based understanding of family, fertility, and sexuality are related to this assumption. We are now reaping the consequences, and despite the author's optimism about our ability to change this through various paradigm-shifts, any realist can see that the Western world has essentially castrated itself.

Finally, something which has not been addressed here is the growing push for legalized euthanasia and assisted-suicide in the post-West. How many here do not see a coming temptation to simply kill off those who are "worthlessly sucking up resources" and so forth? Assuredly, it is coming. Combined with neurotic hand-wringing over the "health" of the environment in almost every quarter which has power and influence, and you have a recipe for full-blown mass murder.

The future looks bright, does it not?

An interesting topic and one that I have been following for a number of years. In the early 1990's I remember my anthropology professor going on about the coming "population bomb" and how humans would reproduce in a Malthusian fashion until there would be only teeming masses beset by famine and war. You can still see the echoes of this thinking in today's common belief (see many of the above comments as well as a Mr. Gore) that we are certain to face complete environmental disaster in the near future. This will be wrought by climate destruction brought by too many humans using finite and polluting resources. It seems that people have been told for quite some time now that more people equals less for everyone, when the reality has often been the opposite. True more people equals more mouths to feed, but it also means more hands to feed those mouths. Not to mention brains to engineer new solutions to problems.

Rapidly gaining or losing population seems to be the most detrimental. Nigeria is currently experiencing the negatives of having a massive increase in the last 30 years while Russia and others will be facing the opposite problem. Countries should be striving to maintain some sort of balance in the cyclical nature of birth rates. Although it is not clear that governments have an overriding say in the matter, certainly Communism has had a large effect on the birth rate of respective countries mainly due to totalitarian tactics and propaganda. Education (particularly of women) and culture change also have had huge effects on population rate and will in all likelihood continue the downward tend of births. Television and now the internet will do their part to encourage Brazilians and the rest of the world to have fewer children. Hopefully not too slowly. Children should be valued just as much as the elderly. And don't forget about us working stiff adults!