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The Empty Cradle by Phillip Longman, New America Books/Basic Books, $26, ISBN 0465050506 Reviewed by Fred Pearce

THE story is this. Europe is a continent of “fading nations” in which falling birth rates threaten to bring about rampant ageing and a population crash. The US – for this is a book written by and for Americans – cannot and will not go the same way. The future of global capitalism depends on it.

So the US has a choice between “Talibanisation”, in which fundamentalists send women back home to make babies and save the nation, and a more liberal way.

That liberal…

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