Idiocracy, then, gets back to the 1920's and 1930's ideas of eugenics
and 'propagation of the fit' (lampooned by Dorothy Sayers in her book
Gaudy Night): educated people must reproduce to make sure we still have
smart people on the planet--as if all the poor people were stupid.
So far, I've really only see one or two comments on the relative weights
of ecological footprints between those in first world countries deciding
not to have kids and those in third world countries having lots of kids.
Most any bunch of third world kids will have a whole lot smaller
ecological footprint than most any first world kid or non-child-bearing
first-world adult. A year or so ago, here on Ecolog, this point was
raised. First world ecological footprints are huge compared to third
world ones--even with 'only one' long-haul flight a year (that one
flight adds a whole planet to an ecological footprint:
www.myfootprint.org).
So, the third world may be making most of the babies, but it is the
first (and second) world that is doing most of the consumption and is
the driving force behind most ecological disasters from mountain top
removal for coal to logging for living room furniture to wars for oil.
The arguments about having kids to maintain social security are not any
different from the arguments about having kids to take care of you in
your old age. In the third world, kids ARE social security. The point
I've always wondered about is this: what sort of social security will
these kids have?
CL
Please note my new-old email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Cara Lin Bridgman
P.O. Box 013 Phone: 886-4-2632-5484
Longjing Sinjhuang
Taichung County 434
Taiwan http://megaview.com.tw/~caralin/
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