Demographic Crises and Obama's Science Czar

Mark Steyn notes that more people are starting to pay attention to the looming crisis caused by falling birthrates in developed countries. This was a main focus of Steyn's book, America Alone. We're talking about countries which seem the most secular and sophisticated, where cradle-to-grave government supports are most established and where family supports are nice, but not necessary, in order to feel secure about raising a child. Countries where most everyone believes in the importance of collective social responsibility. Like Japan and Canada - the two countries mentioned in Steyn's post. Ironically, these are often the countries where people don't seem to want to have children - or at least more than one or two. For a while, Japan was paying college-educated couples to have children. Don't know if they still are.

As Lawrence M. Miller notes, everybody wants security, but when people in an organization or a society feel too secure, everything starts to fall apart. One of the paradoxes of life.

Japan has added problems caused by suddenly opening the workplace to women not long ago, giving them an alternative to the often repressive traditional marriage customs in Japan. When I was in school, it was the policy of the Japanese government to send only girls as exchange students because the boys often acted like demanding, spoiled jerks in home settings. They gave Japan a bad image. When women found themselves with more choices in Japan, many either decided not to marry or decided to drastically limit their families to reduce their responsibilities.

Which brings us to a scary book co-authored by Obama's Science Czar:

. . . If society’s survival depended on having more children, women could he required to bear children, just as men can constitutionally be required to serve in the armed forces. Similarly, given a crisis caused by overpopulation, reasonably necessary laws to control excessive reproduction could be enacted.

Other nice ideas: Forcibly taking children from single mothers, putting sterilants in the water, forced abortions and preventing reproduction by "undesirables".

The last point was one of the assumed reasons for Roe v. Wade, according to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Not that we know whether she ascribed to this view personally or if she was just describing the thinking of Roe v. Wade proponents. But we still have the issue of Medicaid funding for abortions - whether taxpayers deeply opposed to abortions should be forced to pay for them. It always seemed strange to me that with all the ultra-rich liberals in America, they couldn't come up with some way to fund abortions for poor women themselves, without turning to the public sector and thus, ratcheting up opposition to "pro-choice". But I digress.

There are a lot of important ideas to think about here. But one thing is clear: Obama's science czar was incredibly wrong about the "coming population crisis" - at least with respect to developed countries where the measures he suggested might be feasible. The maturing generation in America will have trouble paying for the entitlements of aging baby boomers in the future, even though our reproductive rates have not yet fallen below the number necessary for replacement. Other developed countries are in much worse shape in terms of demographics. Holdren was wrong during the 1970s about the prospects for global cooling, too. He also incorrectly predicted shortages in commodities - the availability of all 5 he listed increased. Could Holdren also be wrong now about other things?

The American Left has, in the last 40 years, been incredibly short-sighted about most of their social causes and scientific preoccupations. For example, Holdren would probably not have thought much about taking children away from single mothers if Lyndon Johnson's Great Society welfare programs had not done so much to encourage single motherhood among the poor, especially among poor blacks.

If you start to think that American conservatism is an important source of potential tyranny in our age, read through the links above one more time. Do a little reading on your own, too. Check the references if you like.

Update: This is the party of "impartial science"?

And Holdren never has ceased peddling calamity as science.

Today, for instance, though Holdren publicly has tempered his aversion to population growth, he still advocates that government nudge us toward fewer children.

Instead of coercion, though, he is a fan of "motivation."

When, during his Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren was asked about his penchant for scientific overstatements, he responded that "the motivation for looking at the downside possibilities, the possibilities that can go wrong if things continue in a bad direction, is to motivate people to change direction. That was my intention at the time."

"Motivation" is when Holdren tells us that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion people by 2020. Or when he claimed that sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the end of this century when your run-of-the-mill alarmist warns of only 13 inches.

"Motivating"—or, in other words, scaring the hell out of people—about "possibilities" is an ideological and political weapon unsheathed in the effort to pass policies that, in the end, coerce us to do the right thing.

Read the whole thing. There's no reason why "motivation" could not become "coercion" again during a perceived crisis. And this guy is very good at perceiving crises. They're just usually not the real crises. There are plenty more policy wonks and politicians out there just like him. No, this is NOT the party of "impartial science". It is the party of post-normal science.

Post-normal science allows EPA officials to feel like they're doing the right thing when they suppress a report by one of their employees which suggests looking more closely at recent science on global warming, for example. It allows Holdren to engage in "scientific overstatements" in order "to motivate people to change direction". Post-normal science is a drastic break with previously accepted ethical rules regarding scientific research. Most older scientists would likely think of it as "lying".