Malthus is one of the mental diseases that just won't go away. He planted the idea that people are overpopulating the earth. Paul Ehrlich then took it to the paradoxical level and declared we would overpopulate ourselves to extinction.
It hasn't happened, of course. For the past 100 years, "responsible" adults have limited the size of their families for the sake of world peace, order, goodness, and sanity.
It had nothing to do with preserving their bank accounts and time and wife's body. It'd odd. We can't get fellow Catholics to sacrifice their Netflix account for the sake of sending a message against sexualizing children or mocking Christ during Lent, but for a long time, they've been willing to sacrifice having children for the sake of the world order.
The modern litany: "Despite technologies, regulations, and policies to make humanity less of a strain on the earth, people just won't stop reproducing. By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren't the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations."
These authors say it's all wrong.
Like, totally wrong.
That's the argument of the authors Empty Planet, which is due out February 5th. "After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. 'In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline,' they write."
The reason is pretty simple. According to the authors, women across the world are getting educated, urbanized, and sophisticated. They don't want to birth babies.
"We polled 26 countries asking women how many kids they want, and no matter where you go the answer tends to be around two. The external forces that used to dictate people having bigger families are disappearing everywhere. And that's happening fastest in developing countries. In the Philippines, for example, fertility rates dropped from 3.7 percent to 2.7 percent from 2003 to 2018. That's a whole kid in 15 years. In the US, that change happened much more slowly, from about 1800 to the end of the Baby Boom."
Today's woman is simply selfish, all over the globe. She doesn't want to sacrifice her life for children.
But hey, it sounds like she's honest about it. She doesn't claim to be doing it for the sake of the world order.
