Disposable People
It is a nearly unmentionable scandal of civilized life, or, more generally agricultural life, that it produces more people than the world has room for. It's no secret, of course, since the Rev Malthus prominently discussed it 217 years ago. That influential essay, which inspired Darwin and gave economics its grim nickname - The Dismal Science - hasn't exactly been forgotten, but its hardly mentioned in modern economics. It's fashionable to pretend that progress and capitalism "refuted" Malthus. The truth is that something like the opposite has occurred. Modern technology has permitted birth control, and where it has been aggressively pursued, economic progress has nearly always followed. China is the poster boy. The vast decline in the World's extreme poverty that we have seen in the last thirty years is mostly due to the rapid economic progress of China, and that progress followed the one child policy. What I really want to talk about, though, is the me...