When Democracy: A Journal of Ideas launched as a rival to the neocon journals started a generation ago, the promise was the left may have another piece in the intellectual infrastructure to build a true, lasting, and ideologically cohesive movement.

It appears that we still have some work to do.

The cover story, Jedediah Purdy's "The New Biopolitics" is an illuminating portrait of a critical issue: global demographics -- ranging from Europe's problem of youth shortage to Asia's problem of girl shortage.

The fact that China is missing tens of millions of girls -- a fact that means tens of millions of lonely, single men and the attendant social problems -- is absolutely huge. That Europe faces massive economic problems due to population decline combined with an aging society is equally problematic.

Unfortunately, after extensively laying out the problem, Purdy's solution falls far short:

Imagine a contract in which the governments of Germany, Japan, and Italy agreed to subsidize investments in education, public health, and infrastructure in India and China. In return, the Indian and Chinese governments would commit a share of future GDP to subsidize the public pension plans of the investor countries as their dependency ratios rise.

The basic idea here is that doing so would not just prevent the economic problems associated with population decline in Europe, but that the infrastructure developments would also solve Asia's problems with a gender gap. The infrastructure would narrow the wage gap, in theory, which in turn would encourage less gender bias in child-birthing.

The proposal fails on a number of fronts. First, to think that Europeans will happily make a reasonable trade to invest now for long-term promises is problematic. People are notoriously bad at investing for the long term, which is one of the reasons why governments take it over. Second, this assumes that solid investment decisions are made by Europe and the developing world. Otherwise, the developing nations get no benefit but continue to get debt. Third, the future people who will be giving a portion of their taxes back to Europe are unlikely to have been involved in the political process that agreed to deal. Regardless of whether the investment results in growth, what serious protection actually prevents China from simply defaulting on the agreement? Is Italy going to start a ground war in Asia? Fourth, any solutions on the gender issues in Asia are likely to take 1-2 generations to solve on this plan. We're talking forty years. That's deeply problematic.

Beyond these issues, Purdy spends little time fleshing out anything close to details of the plan, which I guess is why it is called big think.

Meanwhile, as frequent CP.org contributor Ezra Klein pointed out, Democracy elsewhere suffers from thinking too small. Jason Furman's groundbreaking idea to solve America's health care crisis? Shore up the employer-based system by tweaking the health code!

There's a revolution we can rally around.

Democracy has a long way to go. They'd be well-suited to think bigger in some cases. It's also disappointing that these big think pieces tend to be from the third-way triangulator wing of American politics. This faction has had a vehicle for "big think" for twenty years - the DLC and the Progressive Policy Institute. It's the true progressive movement that needs such a forum.