“When 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren, how do you grow your economy in an ever shrinking market?”

Mark Steyn at National Review: Whether or not that’s what Rick Santorum said, it’s certainly the case that “demographic winter” makes Europe’s troubles all but impossible to solve. As you have observed, demographic decline doesn’t have to be an existential threat. The population of my town in New Hampshire peaked in the 1820 census and then dropped steadily until 1940, and we survived it because (unlike the latter-day US and EU) we hadn’t erected a system of government that depended on looting the future to bribe the present.