Well done, Patrick. Anti-human doomerism and anti-energy abundance doomerism should both be confined to the dust bin of history. Humans have shown a near unblemished history of overcoming identified threats - be it illiteracy, polio, obesity, infant mortality or financial melt downs. The Talmud says - we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are. Optimism has factually prevailed over pessimism. Let's remember we will all get the world we deserve - either in this life or the next.
What we need is to get the middle upper middle class to breed more. That means lowering taxes on high fertility members of that class and raising them on lower fertility members of that class.
But nobody wants to hear that. It’s “judgy”. And people of that class can “afford” children. But of course if they can “afford” them but it causes a huge drop off in relative status compared to their class peers they aren’t going to have them.
The over educated elites like Ehrlich generate almost all the really dumb ideas. Ehrlich was 100% wrong on pretty much everything but was still lauded by his peers... much like X Kendi is today.
Is the goal to get the average woman to have 2.1 children (replacement) versus the current 1.6?
There is little evidence that anyone knows how to achieve this. Financial incentives to date have not been successful. Perhaps much larger ones would be, but we have a federal budget deficit of over two trillion/year. For now, the clearest way to prevent population decline in the USA is to increase immigration! Is that what we should do?
As for Ehrlich, there has to be some limit to the amount of oil the world can burn and the amount of plastic we can discard without continuing to degrade our environment. Yet we have an administration that is actively opposing expansion of solar and wind power. Perhaps Ehrlich was just 50-60 years to early in his predictions.
Well done, Patrick. Anti-human doomerism and anti-energy abundance doomerism should both be confined to the dust bin of history. Humans have shown a near unblemished history of overcoming identified threats - be it illiteracy, polio, obesity, infant mortality or financial melt downs. The Talmud says - we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are. Optimism has factually prevailed over pessimism. Let's remember we will all get the world we deserve - either in this life or the next.
What we need is to get the middle upper middle class to breed more. That means lowering taxes on high fertility members of that class and raising them on lower fertility members of that class.
But nobody wants to hear that. It’s “judgy”. And people of that class can “afford” children. But of course if they can “afford” them but it causes a huge drop off in relative status compared to their class peers they aren’t going to have them.
The over educated elites like Ehrlich generate almost all the really dumb ideas. Ehrlich was 100% wrong on pretty much everything but was still lauded by his peers... much like X Kendi is today.
Is the goal to get the average woman to have 2.1 children (replacement) versus the current 1.6?
There is little evidence that anyone knows how to achieve this. Financial incentives to date have not been successful. Perhaps much larger ones would be, but we have a federal budget deficit of over two trillion/year. For now, the clearest way to prevent population decline in the USA is to increase immigration! Is that what we should do?
As for Ehrlich, there has to be some limit to the amount of oil the world can burn and the amount of plastic we can discard without continuing to degrade our environment. Yet we have an administration that is actively opposing expansion of solar and wind power. Perhaps Ehrlich was just 50-60 years to early in his predictions.