With the urgent debate on demographic declines in some parts of the world, a historical reminder of what worked and what didn’t may be useful. It offers insights into the far broader picture of the links between people’s private decisions…

The pessimistic tone about Social Security, aging population, government deficits, taxes, the dollar, ways to compete with hundreds of millions of hard-working Chinese and Indian youngsters, assumes that there isn’t much to be optimistic about the United States when it…