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The idiot won't mention that to the extent that growth rate went down it is due in part the policies the article criticizes.
oh, you just love making up your own shit don't you.
authorities will embrace policies to limit population.
And it will be much better this way.
PSYCHOPATH!
authorities will embrace policies to limit population.
And it will be much better this way.
Better for who?
You got yours, but those icky brown 3rd world people will be subject to forced sterilizations and draconian carbon reduction schemes.
Heraclitusstudent
2015 Nov 4, 4:49pm
You got yours, but those icky brown 3rd world people will be subject to forced sterilizations and draconian carbon reduction schemes.
Better for everyone that lives on this planet.
Besides I never said forced sterilization (or forced anything else) is the way to go.
John Bailo
2015 Nov 7, 1:18pm
You're merging two problems.
Obviously we need to limit, if not severely reduce population.
But that Chinese chose infanticide as a response because they all wanted boys, is a completely separate problem.
I'm for a 1 child per family aggregate approach.
That is, if a family wants to have 5 children, and they find 5 people willing to be childless "aunts" then go ahead, get the IUD and let those who are really qualified to be parents do the job.
I would also reward low birthrate families with all kinds of free tuition and tax credits and even housing as a positive incentive.
New Renter
2015 Nov 9, 4:39pm
that's why nobody is saying that except for you, who is making shit up to fit your delusional BULLSHIT apocalyptic fantasy jerk-off genocidal orgasm. leave it to a PSYCHOPATHIC SELF-LOATHING ASSHOLE leftist to suggest the only solution is to neuter and/or terminate humans en masse.
the world population growth rate has been in decline since the 1960's and is currently half that rate - it will half again by 2050 to be around 0.5% per annum. not to mention any unforeseen natural disaster or disease to contribute to the ratio, or the inability of governments to support welfare leeches who multiply to obtain funding and housing entitlements AND THOSE BLOOD SUCKERS VOTE DEMOCRAT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FUCK OFF YOU PARASITE. please put a bullet in your head to help your own cause. sick motherfucker.
Christ, did someone forget to take their meds again?
Shaman
2015 Nov 10, 2:30am
It's a culture problem and it's already being addressed. Or haven't you noticed that American culture is changing at an ever increasing rate? We are in the middle of a giant experiment to determine what is the most optimal
Culture for our current era. Multiculturalism aside (way aside, it's a propaganda distraction) culture is the essential force to regulate all the necessary factors in society.
Shaman
2015 Nov 10, 2:34am
Some cultures aren't beneficial for their adherents in this era, those cultures will fall by the wayside as their adherents convert to more appropriate cultures. It's happening already, as can be easily seen with the conversion of marriage morals to include gay marriage. It has to continue if society is to move forward to embrace the chances technology has wrought.
Y
2015 Nov 10, 6:02am
How about a chart showing post puberty male-female imbalance for nations initiating wars?
a male-female birth imbalance of 118-100,
I would also reward low birthrate families with all kinds of free tuition and tax credits and even housing as a positive incentive.
You realize that most Western nations in the West (and Japan) have government incentives to have MORE children since their birthrates are already so low? Why do you think Merkel in Germany and the other EU elites are allowing millions of Muslim/Arab refugees into their countries?
I don't think we need more people on the planet, but the West at least needs to maintain our population size to pay our massive entitlement Ponzi schemes.
tatupu70
2015 Nov 10, 9:36am
but the West at least needs to maintain our population size to pay our massive entitlement Ponzi schemes.
Not to nitpick, but the phrase Ponzi scheme has been butchered so badly to where most don't even understand what it is.
By definition, if something works with a stable population, it's NOT a Ponzi scheme.
Heraclitusstudent
2015 Nov 10, 10:36am
Why do you think Merkel in Germany and the other EU elites are allowing millions of Muslim/Arab refugees into their countries?
Most leaders today WANT their population to grow, for economic reasons:
Growth = {population growth} + {productivity growth}
They need growth so desperately that they are willing to bring millions of foreigners in a country to the point of destroying the local culture, all in the name of temporary growth.
The emergence of AI will change this radically, because {productivity growth} will be so high that population won't matter anymore. Robots will produce to pay for entitlements.
You will see western leaders suddenly become anti-immigration. Frontiers will be enforced by shooting on sight.
By definition, if something works with a stable population, it's NOT a Ponzi scheme.
But everyone knows we don't have the same worker/retiree ratio that we once did when our entitlement programs were first created.
tatupu70
2015 Nov 10, 11:51am
But everyone knows we don't have the same worker/retiree ratio that we once did when our entitlement programs were first created.
Yep--that's why we have an issue with social security as the boomers retire. Not because it's a Ponzi scheme.
Yep--that's why we have an issue with social security as the boomers retire. Not because it's a Ponzi scheme.
It's still a Ponzi scheme if we don't have enough people paying in to support the beneficiaries.
Social Security started with roughly 40 workers per retiree. Now it is down to less than 3 workers per retiree and the retirees are living much longer.
We either need to increase our working population or reduce the number of beneficiaries.
tatupu70
2015 Nov 10, 12:08pm
It's still a Ponzi scheme if we don't have enough people paying in to support the beneficiaries.
No, it's really not. A Ponzi scheme is a very well defined scam. Social security doesn't fit in the definition.
Social Security started with roughly 40 workers per retiree. Now it is down to less than 3 workers per retiree and the retirees are living much longer.
We either need to increase our working population or reduce the number of beneficiaries.
Or some of many, many other recommendations. The solutions are well known-it's just up to our politicians to have the will to implement them.
tatupu70
2015 Nov 10, 1:37pm
Why don't you tell us what they are.
I know it's too much to ask for you to do your own research. Get rid of the max out on social security withholding. Reduce yearly increases in payouts. Means test the payouts. Are a few of many, many potential changes.
Heraclitusstudent
2015 Nov 10, 3:22pm
1984 is sooo 2014.
Private services are automatically collecting plates numbers on the freeway. Your computer is under surveillance. Microsoft collects text typed under its OS. Facebook supervise your social life. Google browsers and phones are listening to conversations in your living room. Apple iphones probably as well. All this probably end-up into some NSA database. In some cases webcams have been used by authorities without the knowledge of the owner of the computer. They can probably easily be used in that way at will.
Oppression and war?
tatupu70
2015 Nov 10, 3:44pm
Why?? Someone pays in for 50 years, doesn't overspend during their working years, saves money responsibly for retirement, and you want to take away their S.S. that they earned?
While someone else lives paycheck to paycheck and doesn't save and you want to give them full s.s. because they didn't plan for retirement?
Really??
You really are a fucking socialist, aren't you??
You are a complete idiot. I wasn't saying I was for or against any of those solutions. You asked what the other potential solutions were so I presented a few for you.
marcus
2015 Nov 10, 4:43pm
Most leaders today WANT their population to grow, for economic reasons:
Growth = {population growth} + {productivity growth}
They need growth so desperately that they are willing to bring millions of foreigners in a country to the point of destroying the local culture, all in the name of temporary growth.
Or do they bring the immigrants in because they want cheap over abundant labor and chaos, both of which make it easier to control the political needs of the masses. Maybe to them, destroying cultures is a feature and not a bug.
The fear and chaos create a lot of future Fox news lovers or whatever the equivalent is in European countries. Meanwhile they cause terrorism to occur against the west and you have even more fear in the population that can be used to easily manipulate the masses.
Or perhaps I've been listening to too much Noam Chomsky. His views do seem to make sense out of otherwise illogical behaviors of world governments and leaders.
Heraclitusstudent
2015 Nov 10, 5:03pm
Or do they bring the immigrants in because they want cheap over abundant labor and chaos, both of which make it easier to control the political needs of the masses. Maybe to them, destroying cultures is a feature and not a bug.
I think it's a bug caused by their overwhelming focus on economic issues. Cheap labor helps productivity. More consumers help consumption. That's all they see. That's all they care about.
I think they lost track of what a population of a country is. A population is not a random group of people. It's a group of people with shared beliefs, values, language and culture. If any person coming with a suitcase is part of your group then you are not a population.
« First « Previous Comments 23 - 44 of 44 Search these comments
The Tyranny of a Big Idea
Modern liberals are best understood as would-be believers in search of true faith.
By BRET STEPHENS
Nov. 2, 2015 7:23 p.m. ET
Maybe Sigmund Freud should have been a political scientist. Psychoanalysis might be useless as treatment for neurotics, but there’s something to be said for it as a mode of ideological investigation. To wit, what explains the fatal attraction of the secular mind to the politics of impending apocalypse?
I’m reminded of this again as embarrassed eulogies are being written for China’s one-child policy, which Beijing finally eased last week after a 35-year experiment in social folly and human cruelty. Instituted in the name of resource conservation, the policy resulted in millions of forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations, a male-female birth imbalance of 118-100, and a looming demographic disaster as Chinese grow old while the working population shrinks.
As government policy goes, the one-child policy was as repressive and illiberal as it gets: the ultimate invasion of privacy; the ultimate assault on the human rights of women and girls. Naturally, liberals loved it.
They loved it, in part, because it had been their idea to begin with. Paul Ehrlich helped get the ball rolling with his 1968 blockbuster “The Population Bomb,†which begins with the words: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.†Mr. Ehrlich, a biologist at Stanford, had no scholarly credentials as a demographer or an economist. But that didn’t keep him from putting a scientific gloss on a personal prejudice.
From “The Population Bomb†there came Zero Population Growth, an NGO co-founded by Mr. Ehrlich. Next there was the United Nations Population Fund, founded in 1969, followed by the neo-Malthusian Club of Rome, whose 1972 report, “The Limits to Growth,†sold 30 million copies. In India in the mid-1970s, the Indira Gandhi regime forcibly sterilized 11 million people. Then-World Bank President Robert McNamara praised her for “intensifying the family planning drive with rare courage and conviction.†An estimated 1,750 people were killed in botched procedures.
Power is seductive, as are fame and wealth, and it’s easy to see how being a scientific prophet of doom afforded access to all three. So long as the alarmists fed the hysteria, the hysteria would feed the alarmists—with no end of lucrative book contracts and lavish conferences in exotic destinations to keep the cycle going. It’s also not surprising that someone like Mr. Ehrlich, trained as an entomologist, would be tempted to think of human beings as merely a larger type of insect.
“My language would be even more apocalyptic today,†an unrepentant Mr. Ehrlich told the New York Times earlier this year. “The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is to me exactly the same kind of idea as, everybody ought to be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.†Notice what Mr. Ehrlich is comparing to garbage.
But the real question isn’t what drives people to be leaders of a new movement. That’s easy enough to understand. It’s why so many people—usually well-educated, urbane liberals—would wish to be followers.
It isn’t the strength of the evidence. The idea of a population bomb was always preposterous: The world’s 7.3 billion people could fit into an area the size of Texas, with each person getting 1,000 square feet of personal space. Food has never been more abundant. As for resource scarcity, the fracking revolution reminds us that scarcity is not so much a threat to mankind as it is an opportunity for innovation.
What matters, rather, is the strength of the longing. Modern liberalism is best understood as a movement of would-be believers in search of true faith. For much of the 20th century it was faith in History, especially in its Marxist interpretation. Now it’s faith in the environment. Each is a comprehensive belief system, an instruction sheet on how to live, eat and reproduce, a story of how man fell and how he might be redeemed, a tale of impending crisis that’s also a moral crucible.
In short, a religion without God. I sometimes wonder whether the journalists now writing about the failure of the one-child policy ever note the similarities with today’s climate “crisis.†That the fears are largely the same. And the political prescriptions are almost identical. And the leaders of the movement are cut from the same cloth. And the confidence with which the alarmists prescribe radical cures, their intolerance for dissenting views, their insistence on “global solutions,†their disdain for democratic input or technological adaptations—that everything is just as it was when bell-bottoms were in vogue.
China’s one-child policy has been one of the great unrecognized tragedies of our time. It is a modern-day lesson in the danger of environmental fears and the misanthropic solutions they typically inspire. It behooves us to learn its lessons before we repeat its mistakes on a vaster scale.
Write bstephens@wsj.com.