It is as if those experts are wearing glasses that will not let them see the connection between demographics and prosperity.

In fact, they are wearing such lenses—their worldviews. Thirty-plus years of “population bomb” rhetoric has caused most people to think that “overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing the globe.” In fact, as Philip Longman, the author of The Empty Cradle, points out, “the opposite is true.”

As Longman notes in Demographic Winter, no society has both a shrinking population and a growing economy. The two are incompatible. Yet our culture denies the problem.

It could hardly do otherwise: As Demographic Winter documents, the “birth dearth” is largely the product of our values. Clearly, our society believes that individual self-satisfaction—measured in terms of material prosperity—is more important than the creation and welfare of future generations. The irony here is that our material prosperity depends on those future generations.

To solve the problem, we have got to ask ourselves, as I titled my book some years ago, “How now shall we live?” What is the biblical worldview? We need to see the world through new glasses—through God’s eyes.