Destruction Of The Family: The Agenda and the Methods

Alex Newman is spot on.

‘The Population Bomb’ was wrong: The world now struggling to make more babies

By Glenn H. Reynolds
April 3, 2024

I was born in the 1960s, just about the time people decided it was bad for children to be born.

Oh, I don’t take it personally. It’s just people started to worry about a “population explosion.”

Thanks to antibiotics, vaccines, mosquito eradication and better farming, people weren’t dying off as they had been.

But they were still having babies.

This led to more people.

And quite a few folks — themselves already born — thought that was bad.

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.

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.

But don’t laugh too hard at the Chinese, because the problem is hitting almost everyone.

Two decades ago, Phillip Longman wrote in Foreign Affairs about the coming “Global Baby Bust”: “Today, the average woman in the world bears half as many children as did her counterpart in 1972. No industrialized country still produces enough children to sustain its population over time, or to prevent rapid population aging.”

Now it’s happening.

“Global fertility isn’t just declining, it’s collapsing,” James Pethokoukis writes.

“If you’re a Millennial or a younger Gen Xer, you’ll probably see the start of a long-term decline in human population due to the global collapse in fertility. That’s something that’s never happened before with Homo sapiens.”

Fewer people are being born; in most countries outside Africa, nations (including the United States) are not producing enough people to replace the ones dying.

This means the population will shrink, and the average age will go up.

Some people think that’s fine.

The world was doing OK with 3 or 4 billion people before, so why should we worry having that few people again?

The trouble is 4 billion people on the way up is a very different population from 4 billion on the way down.

The former was young and dynamic, with productivity increasing and risk-taking popular.

The latter will be older, probably with a lower appetite for risk, and becoming less productive as it ages further.

Some nations are already trying, with limited success, to encourage people to have more children.

Others are relying on immigration, though if your native population is shrinking as immigrants pour in, it starts to look less like reinforcements and more like replacement.

Elon Musk has been calling attention to this problem for a while, famously telling Italians their greatest contribution to the future is: “Make more Italians.”

(And he’s put his, er, money where his mouth is, having far more kids than the average American tycoon.)

But as the Chinese have learned, after a couple generations of being told to have fewer kids people aren’t ready to turn on a dime and have more again.

Children are a blessing but also, especially in the early years, a sacrifice.

I sometimes wonder whether the sexual revolution, which stressed nonreproductive sex, flourished in part because the Ehrlich message made that sound virtuous rather than selfish.

Or maybe Ehrlich’s message flourished because it reinforced the sexual revolution.

Meanwhile, the people still around will be the children of parents who had kids, and over a generation or two they’ll probably be disproportionately the children of parents who held pro-natal religious views and had big families.

By the turn of the next century, we may see a world dominated by the descendants of Amish, Orthodox Jews, evangelical Christians, traditional-rite Catholics and fundamentalist Muslims.

Not the 21st century we expected in Ehrlich’s day.

But that’s what we get for listening to an “expert.”

BONUS: Wasn’t it refreshing for J. K Rowling to tell the Scottish government “Arrest me ”

“J.K. Rowling, the world’s most popular novelist. I think she started out as a liberal, but she isn’t crazy and she is a feminist. So she is appalled by the “trans” nonsense, and isn’t afraid to say so. Under newly-enacted law in Scotland, where she lives, that could subject her to arrest. JK Rowling has challenged the new The Hate Crime and Public Order Act .

What a great legal system! The police get to decide what is legal and what is illegal. But I digress. Rowling nailed the problem (or one of them, anyway) with the new bill:

Rowling wrote that Scottish lawmakers had “placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls” by passing the bill.

The new law obviously works to the disadvantage of women, including but not limited to those who are raped by men pretending to be female despite obvious evidence to the contrary.

Rowling concluded with this:

“Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal. I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”

I don’t think Rowling will be arrested, although the linked London Times article says that she was “reported to Northumbria police last month for misgendering [a trans activist].” But that is only because she is rich and famous. Normal people who are less celebrated may well be harassed under the new law.”

2 thoughts on “Destruction Of The Family: The Agenda and the Methods”

Fred Gregory says:

April 4, 2024 at 12:04 pm

Alex Newman is spot on.

‘The Population Bomb’ was wrong: The world now struggling to make more babies

By Glenn H. Reynolds
April 3, 2024

I was born in the 1960s, just about the time people decided it was bad for children to be born.

Oh, I don’t take it personally. It’s just people started to worry about a “population explosion.”

Thanks to antibiotics, vaccines, mosquito eradication and better farming, people weren’t dying off as they had been.

But they were still having babies.

This led to more people.

And quite a few folks — themselves already born — thought that was bad.

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.

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.

But don’t laugh too hard at the Chinese, because the problem is hitting almost everyone.

Two decades ago, Phillip Longman wrote in Foreign Affairs about the coming “Global Baby Bust”: “Today, the average woman in the world bears half as many children as did her counterpart in 1972. No industrialized country still produces enough children to sustain its population over time, or to prevent rapid population aging.”

Now it’s happening.

“Global fertility isn’t just declining, it’s collapsing,” James Pethokoukis writes.

“If you’re a Millennial or a younger Gen Xer, you’ll probably see the start of a long-term decline in human population due to the global collapse in fertility. That’s something that’s never happened before with Homo sapiens.”

Fewer people are being born; in most countries outside Africa, nations (including the United States) are not producing enough people to replace the ones dying.

This means the population will shrink, and the average age will go up.

Some people think that’s fine.

The world was doing OK with 3 or 4 billion people before, so why should we worry having that few people again?

The trouble is 4 billion people on the way up is a very different population from 4 billion on the way down.

The former was young and dynamic, with productivity increasing and risk-taking popular.

The latter will be older, probably with a lower appetite for risk, and becoming less productive as it ages further.

Some nations are already trying, with limited success, to encourage people to have more children.

Others are relying on immigration, though if your native population is shrinking as immigrants pour in, it starts to look less like reinforcements and more like replacement.

Elon Musk has been calling attention to this problem for a while, famously telling Italians their greatest contribution to the future is: “Make more Italians.”

(And he’s put his, er, money where his mouth is, having far more kids than the average American tycoon.)

But as the Chinese have learned, after a couple generations of being told to have fewer kids people aren’t ready to turn on a dime and have more again.

Children are a blessing but also, especially in the early years, a sacrifice.

I sometimes wonder whether the sexual revolution, which stressed nonreproductive sex, flourished in part because the Ehrlich message made that sound virtuous rather than selfish.

Or maybe Ehrlich’s message flourished because it reinforced the sexual revolution.

Meanwhile, the people still around will be the children of parents who had kids, and over a generation or two they’ll probably be disproportionately the children of parents who held pro-natal religious views and had big families.

By the turn of the next century, we may see a world dominated by the descendants of Amish, Orthodox Jews, evangelical Christians, traditional-rite Catholics and fundamentalist Muslims.

Not the 21st century we expected in Ehrlich’s day.

But that’s what we get for listening to an “expert.”

BONUS: Wasn’t it refreshing for J. K Rowling to tell the Scottish government “Arrest me ”

“J.K. Rowling, the world’s most popular novelist. I think she started out as a liberal, but she isn’t crazy and she is a feminist. So she is appalled by the “trans” nonsense, and isn’t afraid to say so. Under newly-enacted law in Scotland, where she lives, that could subject her to arrest. JK Rowling has challenged the new The Hate Crime and Public Order Act .

What a great legal system! The police get to decide what is legal and what is illegal. But I digress. Rowling nailed the problem (or one of them, anyway) with the new bill:

Rowling wrote that Scottish lawmakers had “placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls” by passing the bill.

The new law obviously works to the disadvantage of women, including but not limited to those who are raped by men pretending to be female despite obvious evidence to the contrary.

Rowling concluded with this:

“Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal. I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”

I don’t think Rowling will be arrested, although the linked London Times article says that she was “reported to Northumbria police last month for misgendering [a trans activist].” But that is only because she is rich and famous. Normal people who are less celebrated may well be harassed under the new law.”
1. triadconservative_5yodkx says:
  
  April 4, 2024 at 2:36 pm
  
  I think one of the other pro-family commentators I used to excerpt made the point that large corporations wanted women in the workforce to drive down labor costs. The influential American Jewish community deeply embraced radical feminism, and wanted fewer white people. The liberal mainline Protestant denominations then followed some of this. It all adds up to a witch’s brew that results in smaller families and fewer children.

Comments are closed.