[wing-_-nuts]

Zeihan is a smart guy, but he tends to take his limited expertise and expand it into areas where he doesn't have a strong foundation. I think his ideas on demographics are a bit too deterministic. Demographics don't enter a state where they 'can't' recover. Behavior responds to incentives. The reason why birth rates are plummeting in the developed world is that costs to have kids are soaring. If there was real investment in child care (think, what france and sweden have done, but on steroids), and if higher ed and other costs were mostly covered, people would feel able to have more kids.

Now how do we pay for all that? Dunno. That question is above my pay grade, but I think we'd undoubtedly have to cut spending on other priorities and raise taxes. I think that'd probably be worth it to claw out of a demographic decline.