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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 |
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| Posted by: Procopius2k 2024-04-04 15:38 |
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