What to Expect When No One's Expecting

Look around you and think for a minute: Is America too crowded?For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet thats busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else.Its all bunk. The population bomb never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, weve been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies. Population growth has been slowing for two generations. The worlds population will peak, and then begin shrinking, within the next fifty years. In some countries, its already started. Japan, for instance, will be half its current size by the end of the century. In Italy, there are already more deaths than births every year. Chinas One-Child Policy has left that country without enough women to marry its men, not enough young people to support the countrys elderly, and an impending population contraction that has the ruling class terrified.And all of this is coming to America, too. In fact, its already here. Middle-class Americans have their own, informal one-child policy these days. And an alarming number of upscale professionals dont even go that farthey have dogs, not kids. In fact, if it werent for the wave of immigration we experienced over the last thirty years, the United States would be on the verge of shrinking, too.What happened? Everything about modern lifefrom Bugaboo strollers to insane college tuition to government regulationshas pushed Americans in a single direction, making it harder to have children. And making the people who do still want to have children feel like second-class citizens.What to Expect When No Ones Expecting explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the world.Because if America wants to continue to lead the world, we need to have more babies.