On 11/28/20 10:49 PM, Shane Hopkinson wrote:
So it's a good example of the Malthusian bias of some of this degrowth
stuff - straight numbers about the need to cut back - we are all
living beyond our means - with no mention about social variables of
class, race, gender or capitalism - all in technocratic guise
I've had these discussions with Shane on FB. When the topic of
ecological limits is posed, he begins shouting "Malthusian" just like
Pavlov's dogs reacted to a bell. Don't expect him to explain how the
planet can survive as long as population is not factored in. Communism
has no solution to groundwater exhaustion or fish depletion or climate
change brought on by greenhouse gases. Most people like Matt Huber or
Leigh Phillips who talk about a Green New Deal never consider the toll
that is taken on the planet digging for the metals that go into
batteries. Matthew Iglesias wrote a book calling for the USA to grow to
a billion people. I am sure that Shane would find that book more to his
liking.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21449512/matt-yglesias-one-billion-americans
The case for more — many more — Americans
A conversation with Matthew Yglesias on families, the economy, global
competition, and One Billion Americans.
I want six kids.
It is this, of all my various eccentricities, in which I feel most
utterly alone when I listen to conversations about public policy.
Progressive America no longer has much of a social script for people who
want big families. Wanting lots of children is called selfish, stupid,
fanatical. Religious conservatives seem to be America’s only interest
group that reliably comes out in favor of people choosing to have big
families — but I’m a polyamorous atheist lesbian co-raising my two kids
with three other committed co-parents, and religious conservatives have
no interest in building an America with families that look like mine.
It’s into this void that my colleague Matt Yglesias’s new book, One
Billion Americans, most powerfully steps. It’s a book that asserts that
it’s good, actually, when there are lots of people in the United States.
It’s good for those people, who will be richer and live deeper, more
diverse, more interesting lives. It’s good for our country, which,
Yglesias argues, benefits from its large population when it tries to
provide economic and political incentives for freedom and democracy. It
will mean we don’t cede the future of the world to China, which is
currently engaged in brutal ethnic repression and which has shredded
earlier hopes that it might politically liberalize.
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