11:57:56 AM Family friendly policies the answer to demographic woes? Shannon Roberts | 11 Feb 2013 |  (4)     tags : fertility rates, population decline, Wall Street Journal This week I recommend you to an interesting interview conducted by John Rosen on the Wall Street Journal website with the author of a new book called “What to expect when no one’s expecting”.  You can find it here.  The author, Jonathan Last, succinctly summarises many of the challenges facing the world as a result of low birth rates.  We only have to look like countries like Greece to see that we can’t afford entitlements, for example, without a young working population paying taxes.  The article puts it well: Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff. Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate. Much of the article reiterates what frequent readers of this blog will already know.  However, some of his solutions are unique and it’s interesting to see the tide of public opinion recognising the reality of the‘demographic cliff’ more and more. Read more at Mercator.Net