This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Moller, your host and

president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Jonathan V. Last is senior writer at the Weekly Standard in Washington, D.C.

His writings have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post,

and many other of the nation's most illustrious and influential newspapers.

He's also written for the Claremont Review of Books, the Journal First Things, and others.

His latest book is What to Expect When No One's Expecting.

The subtitle of the book is, America's Coming Demographic Disaster.

Well, what to expect?

I expect a good conversation with Jonathan Last.

Jonathan behind your book, What's to Expect expect when no one's expecting is your

observation that something big is happening in the way human beings behave.

That's right. We just aren't having enough babies.

It's this amazing change in what is really the central fact of the human condition.

You know, throughout recorded history people have always had not always but almost always had

enough people enough babies to sustain themselves to sustain their

civilizations and their populations in their populations. In fact throughout most of recorded

history people have had more than enough to sustain in fact their

populations have grown but beginning in 1968 in America and the Western

industrialized countries fertility rates dropped off the table they fell by half within a matter of years. By

...