December 16th, 2012
Jeff Jacoby writes a very nice column (permalink here) about What to Expect When No One’s Expecting in the Globe. (The comments section over there is hysterical.)
1 commentCulture and Demography
October 5th, 2012
Abe Greenwald touches on a very deep point about American culture:
There is a great and growing divide between what our political reality demands and what our culture now produces, and Bruni gets nowhere near it. Sacrifice is vanishing because the cultural institutions that promote or sanctify it—family, faith, and patriotism—are on the wane. “In 1960, two-thirds (68%) of all [American] twenty-somethings were married,” a 2010 Pew study found. “In 2008, just 26% were.” And in 2011, American births fell to a 12-year low. To previous generations the demands of family meant a life defined by self-denial, delayed gratification, and the giving of one’s time, energy, and money. Is a 42 percent drop in those who claim such an existence supposed to have no effect on the quality of our national character?
As you might imagine, I have quite a lot to say about this in What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, which, coincidentally, is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, and Books-a-Million.
(That’s a temp cover–the final cover art should be coming soon-ish.)
0 comments“Overpopulation” and Population Density
July 13th, 2012
When I write about demographics and the problems with the world’s collapsing fertility rate the first bit of pushback I get is always the same: But the world is overcrowded already! We don’t need more people!
The second part of this argument is complicated but the first is not. The world only looks overcrowded if you live in a major metropolitan area. America, for instance, may look overcrowded if you live in New York or Los Angeles, but the view from Montana is quite different. Yesterday Galley Friends B.W. and K.S. sent me this wonderful graphic on how much space it would require to fit the entire world’s population in one place, using the densities of some pretty livable, modern cities. (Click to enlarge.)
There’s no real point to this–it’s a rhetorical exercise. But it highlights pretty nicely how uncrowded the world is. There are other arguments against population growth, but overcrowding isn’t one of them.
13 commentsSofia Vergara’s Night Reading
April 12th, 2012
As promised: JVL in The Three Stooges. (Click for the big version click here.)
