As late as 1960, European people, including Americans, Australians, and Canadians, numbered 750 million, one-fourth of the 3 billion people alive. Western nations were in the baby boom of the century. Shorn of their empires, the wounds of war healed, they seemed alive with vitality. Indeed, neo-Malthusians were bewailing the population explosion, warning darkly that the earth’s resources and land were running out. They were laughed at. By 2000, however, no one was laughing. While world population had doubled to six billion in forty years, the European peoples had stopped reproducing. Their
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