Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Conservatives Are Stupid Re Everything, Specifically Overpopulation
The NYT's replacement for the venerable William Safire was John Tierney, an idiotic, glorified metro-desk hack. On the occasion of the 300 millionth American (which was this morning, supposedly) he had this to say:
'Overpopulation' is history's oldest environmental crisis, and it's the most instructive for making sense of today's debates about energy and climate change. It's a case study of intellectual arrogance, and of the perils of putting too much faith in a 'scientific consensus' of experts infatuated with their own forecasts...China is facing a new problem: a severe shortage of young workers to support an aging population. The one-child rule has turned out to be both an assault on personal liberty and a public policy mistake. The parents made short-term sacrifices that left them worse off in the long run--the same risk we run with poplicies designed to curb global warming decades from now...The chief plagues and disasters afflicting future generations will be different from the ones forecast by Al Gore or any other popular prophet. The best insurance policy is to build free, prosperous societies of smart, adaptable people.
Whoa. You are stupid. The most annoying thing about conservative swipes at the science-based version of their scary liberal establishment is how they cherrypick the most dated, top-down midcentury bureaucratic methods, as if the left hasn't evolved way beyond that. (Let's not even expose the cognitive dissonance involved in the media and general public's hostility towards "people power" or "activists" or "protesters" or whatever bottom-up attempts at social reform; for the purposes of scaring you with unpleasant scientific facts, every liberal wears a white lab coat and stands next to ENIAC, but when they burn flags they grow their hair long.)
So naturally anyone who mentions that 6.3 billion people is about five times what the earth can support and 300 million Americans unfaily consume an ever-greater share of a finite world's resources is an inflexible Maoist.
Tierney basically says that barbaric 'medical' solutions to overpopulation (such as forced sterilizations, which were in vogue about the same time as lobotomies and a general denial that women could have orgasms) are what anti-growth critics currently propose. And since those ideas suck, growth is best. The "free and prosperous societies of smart, adaptable people" (contentless boilerplate alert) don't exactly emerge where women are condemned to have four children each. The correlation between wealth and low birth rates is pretty much and iron law of reality by now. Check it out. All the richest countries are down by the bottom--as are the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, and let's not mention what economic system those countries painfully transitioned to fairly recently. Even within the US, slow-growth regions like the Northeast enjoy the higest standards of living, and most of the fastest-growing places are full of crime, divorce and other 'social pathologies' that conservatives cite as evidence of our decadence and decline. Tumult and dynamism are simply not conducive to happy people, and although they might generate more aggregate wealth, we have a pretty good idea what direction the money's flowing to under the stewardship of the party allied with right-to-lifers and the Club for Growth.
I especially love (as in hate) Tierney's self-incriminating attack on China for its one-child policy, which may have been draconian, but it was implemented in 1979, and China's economic growth (which he would certainly approve of) basically started around then, too. (It's self-incriminating because he favors privatizing social security, but now he wants to criticize inequality-by-age in a country that lacks its equivalent). China simply would not be China if there were 2.4 billion Chinese. If they are anything close to a technologically advanced country, it is owing at least in part to campaigns against having more than one child. And the worst problem China faces isn't a shortage of young workers; it's a giant migration of 400 million peasants to urban areas and attendant pollution/unemployment/civil unrest as the frighteningly abridged transition to a free-market occurs without much popular participation in the decisions. In other words, top-down and pro-growth policies.
The fact remains that the United States is the developed nation with the highest rate of growth. Economists generally praise this, as endless growth is always necessary to prevent a capitalist polity from crisis. Christians like growth because it proves our 'natural' virility, and how we are uniquely blessed by God to the exclusion of everybody else even though there's no mention of the Western Hemisphere in the Bible. (In our race against the equally rapidly reproducing Muslims, it's literally a deathmatch, according to Left Behind). It can also be cited as another stat proving how we're a third-world nation in disguise. Whatevs. Our rate of growth owes itself almost entirely to immigration. New York State literally exports young people by the tens of thousands every year, because the city and suburbs are unaffordable and upstate lacks jobs, and the state's population continues to grow only because of New York City's resilience as a gateway for immigrants. Without them, we would enjoy negative growth. (Not that I advocate restricting immigration, necessarily).
Presumably in my lifetime there will be 450 million Americans, most of them living in Nevada. I'm skeptical of the possiblity of maintaining our standard of living at that level, but I'm on the fence as to whether our current standard of living is sustainable even today--and it's certainly a thumb in the eye of about 4 billion seriously impoverished people. There need to be way fewer humans, very soon. One way or another, there probably will be.
'Overpopulation' is history's oldest environmental crisis, and it's the most instructive for making sense of today's debates about energy and climate change. It's a case study of intellectual arrogance, and of the perils of putting too much faith in a 'scientific consensus' of experts infatuated with their own forecasts...China is facing a new problem: a severe shortage of young workers to support an aging population. The one-child rule has turned out to be both an assault on personal liberty and a public policy mistake. The parents made short-term sacrifices that left them worse off in the long run--the same risk we run with poplicies designed to curb global warming decades from now...The chief plagues and disasters afflicting future generations will be different from the ones forecast by Al Gore or any other popular prophet. The best insurance policy is to build free, prosperous societies of smart, adaptable people.
Whoa. You are stupid. The most annoying thing about conservative swipes at the science-based version of their scary liberal establishment is how they cherrypick the most dated, top-down midcentury bureaucratic methods, as if the left hasn't evolved way beyond that. (Let's not even expose the cognitive dissonance involved in the media and general public's hostility towards "people power" or "activists" or "protesters" or whatever bottom-up attempts at social reform; for the purposes of scaring you with unpleasant scientific facts, every liberal wears a white lab coat and stands next to ENIAC, but when they burn flags they grow their hair long.)
So naturally anyone who mentions that 6.3 billion people is about five times what the earth can support and 300 million Americans unfaily consume an ever-greater share of a finite world's resources is an inflexible Maoist.
Tierney basically says that barbaric 'medical' solutions to overpopulation (such as forced sterilizations, which were in vogue about the same time as lobotomies and a general denial that women could have orgasms) are what anti-growth critics currently propose. And since those ideas suck, growth is best. The "free and prosperous societies of smart, adaptable people" (contentless boilerplate alert) don't exactly emerge where women are condemned to have four children each. The correlation between wealth and low birth rates is pretty much and iron law of reality by now. Check it out. All the richest countries are down by the bottom--as are the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, and let's not mention what economic system those countries painfully transitioned to fairly recently. Even within the US, slow-growth regions like the Northeast enjoy the higest standards of living, and most of the fastest-growing places are full of crime, divorce and other 'social pathologies' that conservatives cite as evidence of our decadence and decline. Tumult and dynamism are simply not conducive to happy people, and although they might generate more aggregate wealth, we have a pretty good idea what direction the money's flowing to under the stewardship of the party allied with right-to-lifers and the Club for Growth.
I especially love (as in hate) Tierney's self-incriminating attack on China for its one-child policy, which may have been draconian, but it was implemented in 1979, and China's economic growth (which he would certainly approve of) basically started around then, too. (It's self-incriminating because he favors privatizing social security, but now he wants to criticize inequality-by-age in a country that lacks its equivalent). China simply would not be China if there were 2.4 billion Chinese. If they are anything close to a technologically advanced country, it is owing at least in part to campaigns against having more than one child. And the worst problem China faces isn't a shortage of young workers; it's a giant migration of 400 million peasants to urban areas and attendant pollution/unemployment/civil unrest as the frighteningly abridged transition to a free-market occurs without much popular participation in the decisions. In other words, top-down and pro-growth policies.
The fact remains that the United States is the developed nation with the highest rate of growth. Economists generally praise this, as endless growth is always necessary to prevent a capitalist polity from crisis. Christians like growth because it proves our 'natural' virility, and how we are uniquely blessed by God to the exclusion of everybody else even though there's no mention of the Western Hemisphere in the Bible. (In our race against the equally rapidly reproducing Muslims, it's literally a deathmatch, according to Left Behind). It can also be cited as another stat proving how we're a third-world nation in disguise. Whatevs. Our rate of growth owes itself almost entirely to immigration. New York State literally exports young people by the tens of thousands every year, because the city and suburbs are unaffordable and upstate lacks jobs, and the state's population continues to grow only because of New York City's resilience as a gateway for immigrants. Without them, we would enjoy negative growth. (Not that I advocate restricting immigration, necessarily).
Presumably in my lifetime there will be 450 million Americans, most of them living in Nevada. I'm skeptical of the possiblity of maintaining our standard of living at that level, but I'm on the fence as to whether our current standard of living is sustainable even today--and it's certainly a thumb in the eye of about 4 billion seriously impoverished people. There need to be way fewer humans, very soon. One way or another, there probably will be.
