In The Endgame Headwinds (link), John Mauldin, touches on important issues facing the Western world in the next multi-year period. It is a very worthy read.
There are lots of references to the issues further explained in his recently-published book. The excerpts from the book "Endgame: The End of the Debt SuperCycle and How It Changes Everything", by John Mauldin, Jonathan Tepper, is available for preview on Google Books.
Google Books link
Some great quotes from the text are below:
"There are only two ways to grow an economy. Just two. You can increase the working-age population or you can increase productivity. That’s it. No secret sauce."