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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| 2018The Population Bomb was wrong: The world now struggling to make more babies |
| 2024-04-04 |
| [NYPOST] The most famous is Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich, an entomologist whose bestselling book about people, “The Population Bomb,” promised the Earth a grim Malthusian fate, only a decade or so away. We’d see mass starvation, he predicted, and food riots in American cities before the 1970s were out. He urged the Federal Communications Commission to use its powers to ensure large families were always portrayed negatively on TV. (Take that, “Brady Bunch”!) He made a bunch of predictions, and pretty much all turned out to be wrong. (Instead of mass starvation, the biggest nutritional problem on Earth is now obesity, a problem even in countries once associated with hunger.) That Ehrlich made a bundle on wrong predictions isn’t such a big deal — we’ve had dozens of doomsaying futurists who’ve cashed in on fears that never materialized. *cough* AlGore *cough* The problem is people listened to him. Across the world, governments adopted population-trimming policies, from massively subsidized birth control to promoting two-worker households to China’s draconian “one child” policy, in which each couple was allowed only one child. That has left China with crippling demographic problems just as it hopes to burst forth as a superpower on the global scene; it’s now trying to encourage people to have more babies, as its leadership realizes it’s hard to be a superpower when your military-age population is shrinking (and, as only children, too valued by their parents to safely be employed as cannon fodder), your elderly population is growing and your society is stagnating. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #8 So much for the 'demography is destiny' crowd. Just recall that in ancient times false prophets were stoned to death. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2024-04-04 15:38 |
| #7 Let’s see some government incentives for us ugly guys. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2024-04-04 14:57 |
| #6 Or, in context, ex-spurt. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2024-04-04 13:10 |
| #5 Circa 2020: you see the word 'expert' substitute 'crazy people'. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2024-04-04 12:02 |
| #4 Saving trees though. Tropical forest loss decreased in 2023 but global threats remain, data shows |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2024-04-04 11:04 |
| #3 even actually added to Metro water supplies For conception selection of blond/blue eye genes? |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2024-04-04 10:16 |
| #2 1968, not 2018 was the year Ehrlich's book came out |
| Posted by: lord garth 2024-04-04 10:03 |
| #1 Consider the synthetic estrogens residuals and other contaminants are in, or even actually added to Metro water supplies. In the last 12 years there have been a rise in county and Metro local Gov's have banned home-owners from drilling private wells for water. |
| Posted by: NN2N1 2024-04-04 05:17 |