China's family problem is also ours

"With the rise of China’s “new family type”—only children begetting only children—we will be entering a Chinese future in which a growing proportion of the rising generations will lack not only siblings, but also cousins, aunts and uncles. The withering away of China’s extended family networks—the people’s only reliable social safety net since the dawn of Chinese civilization—will surely have profound and far-reaching implications, few of them beneficial." China's Coming Population Crash Scrambles the Global Balance of Power | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

25 years ago I was an English language partner for the wife of an OSU graduate student from China. She studied intently--learned hundreds of words a day--and I enjoyed her company. When I asked her how Americans could tell Japanese from Chinese her hint was, "Japanese were more fashion conscious and dressed better." We met at coffee shops or sometimes at Ohio State.

 
As we talked, I realized we had limited topics--I was older than her parents and both she and her husband had no siblings, and because of China's policies they also had no aunts and uncles and no cousins. What Eberstadt the author warns about in this article had already happened, even 25 years ago. Now it is happening here. And we didn't even have a harsh policy--just social pressure.

Is it affordability or the economy?

Steven Moore said on Fox News the U.S. has 4% of the world's population and 1/2 of the wealth. So, I looked that up (separate sites) and it's true. It's called capitalism, ambition, hard work, entrepreneurship, and wealth accumulation through family networks (i.e. marriage). Other sites quibble. I looked back 20 years in my blog (Dec. 2005) and the Democrats were saying the same ugly things about the George W. Bush economy, only then we called it BDS. Democrats prefer Communism so 99% of us can be poor at the same time and they can acclaim a victory for equity and inclusion.

"The United States 2025 population is estimated at 347,275,807 people at mid-year, equivalent to 4.22% of the total world population." Worldometers.info

 
Aljazeera wants to quibble with Moore using a figure of "adults" but I'll take Moore's word for it. His books explore the impact of taxes, energy, and worker freedom on economic outcomes. The U.S. is the land people are dying to flee to for opportunity. Maybe people are sneaking into China or North Korea and the media just don't report it?

How the Greens gaslight us all . . . but especially the poor.

How the Greens gaslight us all . . . but especially the poor.

 
"According to the World Bank, between 1990 and 2019, as emissions surged, the proportion of the world’s population in extreme poverty fell from 38 percent to 8.4 percent. Food production similarly soared from 2000 to 2020, with global primary-crop production rising by 52 percent, meat production by 45 percent, and vegetable oil production by 125 percent. Those figures well outstripped population growth and resulted in the daily caloric intake rising in every region of the globe. At the same time, the real global economy nearly doubled in value."

https://www.city-journal.org/article/climate-reactionaries?

"Solar and wind are incapable of delivering the power needed for industrialization, powering water pumps, tractors and machines — all the ingredients needed to lift people out of poverty. As rich countries are now also discovering, solar and wind energy remain fundamentally unreliable. No sun or wind means no power. Battery technology offers no answers: today there are only enough batteries to power global average electricity consumption for one minute and 15 seconds. Even by 2030, with a projected rapid battery scale-up, they would last less than 12 minutes. For context, every German winter, when solar is a

its minimum, there is near-zero wind energy available for at least five days — more than 7,000 minutes."

Opinion: The rich world became wealthy by exploiting fossil fuels | Financial Post

"It Is often reported that emerging industrial powers like China, India, Indonesia and Bangladesh are getting more power from solar and wind. But these countries get much more additional power from coal. Last year, China got more additional power from coal than it did from solar and wind. India got three times more electricity from coal than from green energy sources, Bangladesh 13 times more and Indonesia an astonishing 90 times more. If solar and wind really were cheaper, why would these countries not use them? Because reliability matters.

The usual way of measuring the cost of solar simply ignores its unreliability and tells us the price when the sun is shining. The same is true for wind energy. That does indeed make them slightly cheaper than other electricity sources: 3.6 US¢ per kWh for solar, just ahead of natural gas at 3.8 US¢, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But if you account for reliability, their real costs explode: in 2022, one peer-reviewed study showed an increase of 11-42 times, making solar by far the most expensive electricity source, followed by wind."

Bjorn Lomborg: Why solar and wind power aren’t winning (yahoo.com)

"Smartphones, computers and electric vehicles may be emblems of the modern world, but, says Siddharth Kara, their rechargeable batteries are frequently powered by cobalt mined by workers laboring in slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Kara, a fellow at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at the Kennedy School, has been researching modern-day slavery, human trafficking and child labor for two decades. He says that although the DRC has more cobalt reserves than the rest of the planet combined, there's no such thing as a "clean" supply chain of cobalt from the country. In his new book, Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the DRC's cobalt is being extracted by so-called "artisanal" miners — freelance workers who do extremely dangerous labor for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day."

'Cobalt Red' describes the 'horror show' of mining the element in the DRC : Goats and Soda : NPR

Columbus today--according to Wikipedia

Columbus is the state capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Ohio. With a population estimated at 898,553 in 2019, it is the 14th-most populous city in the U.S., the second-most populous city in the Midwest after Chicago, and the third-most populous state capital.[5] Columbus is the county seat of Franklin County; it also extends into Delaware and Fairfield counties.[9] It is the core city of the Columbus, OH Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses ten counties.[10] With a 2019 estimated population of 2,122,271, it is the largest metropolitan area entirely in Ohio.[a]

More at Wikipedia Columbus, Ohio - Wikipedia

City of Columbus

Columbus 2021: Best of Columbus, OH Tourism - Tripadvisor

Best Places to Live in Columbus, Ohio

RGB on population control

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, channeling Margaret Sanger: “Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae – in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong”

Roe v. Wade and the budding environmental movement/ population bomb fears of the 1970s met and wedded. It's not really about "women's health."

https://lifelegaldefensefoundation.org/ginsburg-populations-we-dont-want-too-many-of/?

Town Hall with candidate Bernie

Do the women who ask silly questions at Town Halls know the U.S. birth rate is below replacement rate? So are they asking the candidates to reduce the populations of black and brown countries? Do we have a name for that?

https://dailycaller.com/2019/09/04/bernie-sanders-abortion-climate-change/

A member of the audience asked Socialist Sanders about human population growth during CNN’s climate town hall Wednesday. She specifically asked Sanders whether he would support measures to curb that growth.

Depopulation by choice

Many countries are being depopulated, not by war, but by birth control, abortion and natural death. Europe, Korea and Japan can't replace their own any longer, and have too few children being born to maintain the pensions and retirement costs (like medical and other social services) of their parents and grandparents.  A total fertility rate of 2.07 is required to maintain population and Japan’s is 1.39.  China, too, doesn't have enough young people, or women to continue its economic revolution.  But globalists and leftists in the United States continue the push for abortion and gender selection and households with no children.  Almost as though they had a plan to take over when certain developed countries are took weak and depopulated to fight back.

http://pop.org/content/facts-of-global-depopulation-1518

Unintended consequences—population control

The “West” invented and promoted eugenics and birth control (aka reproductive health) to limit the populations of the developing countries (it still does through the U.N.), but the irony is western developed countries are now at below replacement birth rates, and don’t have enough workers to support those born after WWII.  Without immigration, much of it illegal, the United States would be at negative population growth.  But Mexico has a birth dearth we’re contributing to.

70 countries are below replacement fertility.  Now, environmentalists will say this is a good thing.  What do you say? Slavery used to be a solution for a shortage of manpower.  Would you like to go back to that?  Or maybe just a slow double decade of sluggish economy like Japan?

Look how the baby boomer demographic in the U.S. drove our economy from 1945 to 1980.  Do you really think the collapse in 2007 was just about banking and bad government policies, or can you watch that generation and see there is no one to buy the McMansions or shop at the malls?  Old people save, not spend.

There’s a reason for the term “human capital,” and our current government policy is to destroy it.  The age group that has babies is the one who create the inventions that make our life better.

Ghosts at the Olympics

As fabulous as the Olympics were--the opening and closing spectaculars especially--I couldn't help but feel the death. The death of millions and millions of Chinese citizens by government slaughter, starvation, relocation and reeducation and untold millions more through abortion and infanticide (family planning). In the 20th century, no government was responsible for more deaths than Communist China and its Mao led hysteria. But in this country we fell for a lot of the same nonsense and misinformation. Remember Paul Ehrlich?

In 1967, Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich began a magazine article by writing that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He predicted that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now” to feed them. His article eventually became a book called The Population Explosion, one of the most influential books of the last 40 years.

None of Ehrlich’s dire predictions came true. People did die, but they died as a result of population-control efforts that were spurred by Ehrlich’s imaginary “population explosion.”

In the face of such a so-called “threat,” human dignity gave way. If people did not “voluntarily” limit family size, then coercion and deception stepped in. In India, for example, millions of men and women were sterilized against their will.

This story is told in a new book, Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits, by Steven Mosher. Read review at Chuck Colson’s column.

And so millions more will die as we rush head long into our anthropogenic global warming hysteria to add to the millions killed with the DDT ban brought on by Rachel Carson's book.