Ruth Institute Blog

A great article about the coming demographic winter.  From the article:

News of a population bust might come as a surprise to many Americans. More than two centuries after English scholar Thomas Malthus argued that population growth exceeded the earth’s ability to feed us—“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” he wrote—the media continue to warn us about impending environmental catastrophe and mass starvation caused by an exploding human population. These Malthusian alarms persist even though the last 200 years have proved Malthus completely wrong. As the world’s population shot up, starting around the time of the Industrial Revolution, worldwide standards of living rose in tandem. People proved far more resourceful in expanding food production, tapping new veins of natural resources, and inventing technologies to accommodate a growing population than Malthus dreamed possible. When mass deprivation has occurred in modern times, it has invariably resulted from political tyranny and social chaos, not from an inability to derive enough resources from the earth.

Wow. I love the way this guy thinks.

Michael Cook, Mercatornet.com

…Take the Optimum Population Trust, a superannuated gaggle of gimlet-eyed, thin-lipped Gradgrinds who out-Scrooge Scrooge. Their aim is to slash the number of unfeathered bipeds who pollute the earth with carbon emissions. “Everything we manage to achieve for the natural environment is being wiped out by the nearly 80 million extra people each year who need to use up space and resources,” they claim. They have even launched PopOffsets, a charity which offsets your carbon footprint by reducing the number of babies in the developing world. And they have the nerve to describe themselves as a “charity”!

I can just imagine them counting up their miserabilist PopOffset dollars: “Another $7 for the charity, one less baby in Ghana; $21 for the charity, 3 less in Sierra Leone; $35 for the charity; 5 less in Chad.” And after a heavy night out on New Year’s Eve adding to their carbon footprint with champers and fireworks, the new hair of the dog is a donation to PopOffset to scrub a few more babies from the population of Zaire.

Continue reading.

Time to start having kids, China. If you still can.

Michael Cook, Mercatornet.com

China’s rapid economic development and America’s evident vulnerabilty after the Global Financial Crisis could make the Chinese a bit smug. But as leading demographer Nicholas Eberstadt points out in a frightening article in the Far Eastern Economic Review, China faces gigantic economic problems as the legacy of its one-child policy. Read more…

By Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, first published in the National Catholic Register

“‘Gayby Boom’ Fueled by Same-Sex Parents” screamed a headline on the website of ABC News this past summer. “Post-1980s Children of Gay Parents Thrive in School, More Open Society,” the subhead declared. Was there some new information in this story? Nope. It was just another human-interest story in the noble-homosexuals-who-overcome-adversity-and-stay-true-to-themselves template.

Unfortunately for ABC, a closer look at the source of the few facts in this story tells another story — one the “gay rights” lobby and its allies in the media probably would rather you didn’t hear: Same-sex “marriage” is a completely disproportionate response to an overwrought problem. Most of the feature consisted of interviews with same-sex couples who have raised children together. But among the obvious ploy for sympathy were a few facts, including this eyepopper: “Just under 1% of all couples in the U.S. — or 594,391 people — identify themselves as gay, lesbian or transgender, and about 20% of them are raising children under the age of 18.”

Yes, you read that correctly: Two-tenths of 1% of couples in America are same-sex couples raising children. Read more…

Pete Chagnon – OneNewsNow -

A United Nations group that promotes abortion has released some controversial recommendations concerning “global warming.”

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), birth control and access to family-planning facilities can be a valuable weapon in the fight against supposed “climate change.” The UNFPA sites overpopulation as one of the factors in the earth’s “capacity to adjust” to climate change. Read more…

Carolyn Moynihan, Mercatornet.com

Here is something for the inaugural European Union president, Herman van Rompuy, to put his stamp on: the revival of the European family. The EU is very active in telling member states what to do about certain social issues — for example, condemning a recent Lithuanian law which prohibits promotion of “homosexual, bisexual, polygamous relations” among children under the age of 18 — but it is dragging its feet on the most important social issue of all: the protection and support of the family. Read more…

Michael Cook, Mercatornet.com

The message is finally getting through: the population bomb has fizzled out and fertility is falling nearly everywhere in the world.

Sometime in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country’s population to slow down and eventually to stabilise… The move to replacement-level fertility is one of the most dramatic social changes in history. Read more…