Demography: The Basis of Power and Prosperity

Fifty years ago, the British poet Philip Larkin saw that the world was shifting under his feet. For the '60s generation, Larkin enviously observed, sex would be all about fun: "All at once the quarrel sank … And every life became / A brilliant breaking of the bank, / A quite unlosable game." Gender relations across the past 50 years have been a little more complicated than that, but Larkin was quite right to see that women's rising control over their own conception was one of the greatest upheavals in history. The way that it transformed relationships within countries was made painfully clear in the United States' most recent presidential race. But it also transformed relationships between countries, and not surprisingly, it regularly features in discussions of geostrategy. However, it is hard to avoid the feeling that we still have a long way to go in working out exactly how biology,...