For one US fertility rates are not in crises, and two, the answer is not larger population but

its human capital and its savings, investment and consumption practices

In a new book on United States-Mexico relations, Shannon K. O'Neil of the Council on Foreign Relations writes: "Desperate to close the gaps in America's work force, in the next decade we may be urging Mexicans to come to the United States. In another new book, "What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster," Jonathan V. Last of The Weekly Standard warns of a "population implosion" that will doom the economy to Japan-style stagnation.

These fears are hogwash.

Unlike many wealthy nations that will see their populations stabilize or decrease in coming decades, the United States, the world's third most populous country, is expected to grow -- to to 420.3 million by 2060 from 315.7 million people today. Our fertility rate (1.9 births per woman, slightly below the "replacement rate" of 2.1) has dipped since the Great Recession but is still among the highest of rich countries' and ties or exceeds fertility rates in middle-income countries like Brazil, Iran, Thailand and Vietnam.

It was conservatives who largely invented the "aging crisis," during their 1970s ascendancy. ......conservatives exaggerated these trends to call for welfare state retrenchment: reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Meanwhile, corporations backed the last successful immigration overhaul, in 1986, for the reasons they do now: their desire for a large supply of low-wage labor....

The proposed solution to the fabricated fertility crisis -- more babies -- helped bury the movement for "zero population growth" that environmental activists advocated in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Conservatives and liberals alike generally assume that population growth drives economic growth. But until the triumph of the new laissez-faire economics in the 1970s and 1980s, most economists agreed that what mattered was not the size of a population but its human capital and its savings, investment and consumption practices.

I think it was a poor choice of words, but I certainly know what he meant.