Category: Social & Political Issues

Over the past few months we’ve been reading about protests against steep tuition hikes for state universities by students, teachers and other citizens of the sovereign state of California, home of sunshine, freeways and the world’s sixth largest economy.  In another part of the world, many Pennsylvania drivers are up in arms that the state wants to make I-80 a toll road to help pay for keeping state roads in repair and mass transit improvements.

Today brings more of the same in two strangely similar news reports: One that Arizonans are furious that the state highway department closed all the freeway rest stops.  The second reports of the fear and concern of people and law enforcement groups in California, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon and elsewhere that state prisons are releasing prisoners to cut costs.

What did people expect when governments keeps taxes lower than they should be?  You wonder why tuition is going up, prisoners are getting out early and rest stops are shuttering their WC.  You wonder why so many of your roads and bridges are in disrepair.  You wonder why so many public schools can’t afford new books and computers for their kids.

You can’t provide the service if you don’t have the money.

“Starving the beast” is what many right-wingers call it.  Since the passage of California Proposition 13 in 1978 and the ascent of Reagan in 1981, politicians and legislatures have put local, state and federal revenues on a starvation diet that has led to an erosion of basic services.  The frequent cutting of taxes, particularly for the well-to-do, has emptied the coffers everywhere at the moment when we need public spending more than ever.  Besides helping the victims of the recession ward off starvation and homelessness, we also face the challenge of rebuilding our sewer, road, school and other public infrastructure and we’re in debt.  And yet many politicians and much of the populace call for cutting taxes even more.

Besides not taxing us enough, government has made two grievous errors:

• On the federal level, burning trillions of dollars and counting on two senseless and unwinnable wars. 
• On both the state and federal levels, letting special interests dictate how industrial policy is implemented.  For example, in the Bush administration, the lion’s share of money for alternative energy technologies went to corn biomass conversion, which uses more energy than it creates.  We’ve seen how the gun manufacturers’ lobby has enticed legislators to erode the safety of Americans everywhere.  It seems as if behind every law is a company or industry that campaigned for its passage and will benefit from the way the law is written.

Contrast the United States with Western Europe, which has much steeper taxes than we do, but provides a full range of social services to its citizens — health care, education, retirement all at a high level of quality.  The freeway roads are in fine shape, at least in the five western European countries in which I’ve traveled over the past few years (Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg).  Everywhere you can see the digital revolution has improved the basic infrastructure.  Mass transit within and between cities is uniformly inexpensive, convenient and safe.

Of course if we raised taxes and thereby had the money to fix our infrastructure, invest in better public schools, develop more mass transit and finance health care reform, some people would say we’ve become socialists.  And they might call us commies if we kept our noses and our troops firmly planted outside the internal affairs of other countries.

And who would want that?

I’ve now had a chance to see a lot of the coverage of the study of marriage and cohabitation among men and women ages 15 to 44 that was conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).  Yesterday I analyzed the coverage in the New York Times, which was schizophrenic in that most of the article went about disproving what the article reported in the headline and first two paragraphs as the study’s most important finding.  That finding was that people who cohabit are 6% less likely to be together 10 years after marriage than people who don’t live together before getting hitched.  The Times article buried the real significance of the study, that more than 61% of all women now cohabit with someone else sometime in their lives.

It turns out that most of the rest of the news media focused coverage of the NCHS study on either proving or refuting the assertion that cohabitants are less lucky in marriage later on in life.  Here is a representative sampling of the coverage spins:

• ABC-TV nationally ran with the Times version and may even have broken the story with the misleading, almost fallacious focus that the Times used.
• KGO-TV, the San Francisco ABC affiliate, also ran with the ABC-Times version.  
• Reuters tried to show that marriages last longer than cohabitations, a bizarre twist that reduced the article to a shabby bait-and-switch:  Reuters said that 78% of marriages lasted at least five years, whereas only 30% of cohabitations did, and then immediately pointed out that the main reason that cohabitations ended so soon is because slightly more than half of all cohabitating couples marry within three years of shacking up. 
• USA Today went with the herd on focusing on the question, do more cohabitants divorce?, but at least it got the facts straight, reporting that couples who live together before marriage and those who don’t both have about the same chances of a successful union.  
• Top News took the USA Today line.  
• NBC-TV offered yet another angle for the most newsworthy finding of the study: “Two-thirds of first marriages last at least a decade, which was a goal found to be more likely when the couple had children.  Childless marriages were more than twice as likely to end before the 10 year mark.” 

(Sidetrack: Some media said it was a NCHS survey, while others identified the organization of which NCHS is a part, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  CDC is better known.)

In other words, the news media for the most part entirely ignored the fact that the survey showed that more than 61% of all U.S. women now live with someone in a sexual relationship without the benefit of marriage for some period in their life, twice as many as a mere 15 years ago.

In other words, living together is now the norm.  It may not be what the Christian right or the mainstream media arbiters of taste want to hear or want us to know, but there it is.

It’s too bad that most people depend on the mainstream news media or the rightwing fringe media for most of their information.  Think about all the young women and men made to feel bad by pious bigots of their acquaintance or exhorters against “living in sin” on one of the several Christian TV and radio networks.  If those kids only had access to the NCHS survey they’d realize that everyone’s doing it, which means it’s probably not that bad.

A story on page A14 of today’s New York Times appears to be at war with itself.  Or perhaps the editor and writer are at war over what’s really important in the story.  As this almost ludicrous tale unwinds, I think we’ll see an ideological prejudice fail at twisting a report into something it’s not—that is, for those readers who venture beyond the first three paragraphs of the article.

The story, by Sam Roberts, concerns a study of men and women ages 15 to 44 that was conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) using 2002 data. NCHS is part of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

The headline and the first paragraph serve as a warning to youthful damsels and gentlemen everywhere that cohabitation does not lead to marriage:

Study Finds Cohabiting Doesn’t Make a Union Last

Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found. But their chances improve if they were already engaged when they began living together.

The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found.

In 13 of the remaining 14 paragraphs, Roberts quotes experts who disprove the point of the lead or cites other statistics from the study that are far more interesting than the fact that 6% more people divorce within a decade of marriage if they lived together before the blessed ceremony.

Roberts first uses two experts to deftly dismantle the premise of the lead.  Michigan professor Pamela Smock points out that 6% is not that much.  Then Cornell professor Kelly Musick digs deeper into the statistics to figure out what the body of facts in the survey is really telling us: “The figures suggest to me that cohabitation is still a pathway to marriage for many college graduates, while it may be an end in itself for many less educated women.”

There are so many interesting facts that Roberts tells us, including what to this former journalist was the real headline and lead: “that the proportion of women in their late 30s who had ever cohabited had doubled in 15 years, to 61 percent.”

Now the fact that cohabitation is now the norm and that it’s happened over the course of a mere 15 years: that to me is sizzling hot news.  The fact that a mere 6% more of former cohabitants get divorced than those who waited until marriage to live together seems trivial in a world in which one-third of all marriages break up by the tenth year, also an amazing fact.  For more amazing facts, read the story or go to the study.

The obvious question: why are the headline and lead of this story—the only well-read parts—so at odds with the rest of the article?  It’s as if someone imposed the misleading headline on both the story and the facts.

We know it’s not NCHS or CDC.  The study does not give any special significance or lead role to the 6% statistic anywhere in its abstract, executive summary or introduction.  Moreover, neither the NCHS nor the CDC has yet issued a news release on the study (in which this statistic could have served as a lead or headline).  Check out the news archives if you don’t believe me.  It seems strange not to issue a news release, but I’m guessing that the federal government in this age of faith does not want to appear to be undermining marriage by stating that cohabitation is the norm.

We’ll never know, but I’m guessing that Roberts’ editor/editors and perhaps the headline writer, too, forced the misleading opening on the writer.  And he/she/they did it for ideological reasons: to lead with the fact that promoted the advantages of waiting until marriage to live with your beloved, even if that advantage is minimal. 

Most people only read the headline and first few paragraphs of news stories, so a good part of the literate world will get the wrong idea of what this survey says.  They may never get to the earth-shaking news that cohabitation is now the new normal, which is to say that many more people try it than don’t sometime in their lives.

It was such a tactic by a writer or editor that 20 years ago created the completely false myth that women who don’t marry by 30 probably won’t.  Behind both these manipulations stands the idea that marriage is the preferred state for all, all the time.  It’s clear that the people disagree.

We’re witnessing a perfect example of how unsubstantiated myths gain credence among the news media, the general public and, unfortunately, our leaders as well.

I think you know the kind of myth I’m talking about, but here are some examples of concepts that the news media, elected officials and other leaders promoted as factually correct that turned out to be all wrong, and in many cases were clearly known to be wrong by at least some of the people in the forefront of spreading the untruth:

• Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.
• Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
• An attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin justified escalation of a bloody war in Southeast Asia.
• Capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime.
• Women who don’t marry by the time they turn 30 probably never will.
• Abstinence training leads to fewer teen pregnancies.

How do these myths take hold? 

Usually, it’s with the complicity of the news media, and that’s what we’re seeing with the small campaign by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to tout the absurd idea that the some or all the nations of the European Community (EU) will walk away from its single currency, the euro.

On February 11, I analyzed the Times story by Nicholas Kulish which stated that many Germans want out of the euro.  Most of the story was factual, but the assertions about the euro were sheer speculation. 

In the Thursday, February 25, 2010, Stephen Fidler of the Wall Street Journal grabs the baton from Kulish in a story that analyzes Spain’s economic problems.  The headline is “The Euro’s Next Battleground: Spain” but it’s in the secondary headline that Fidler introduces his big lie:

“Greece set off the crisis rattling the euro zone.
Spain could determine whether the 16-nation currency stands or falls.”

But the story begins by ignoring the false premise, instead giving us a lot of very useful facts about the economic crisis in Spain.  It then proceeds to discuss why sharing a currency with other nations complicates some traditional means that national governments have used to fight past recessions.

Then out of the blue, after a no-brainer statement that buyers of Spanish bonds are demanding higher interest rates, we get the opinion of an expert: “’Spain is the real test case for the euro,’” says Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. ‘If Spain is in deep trouble, it will be difficult to hold the euro together…and my own view is that Spain is in deep trouble.’”Later, after discussing other options for Spain, Fidler returns to his expert, using indirect discourse: ”Mr. Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute is among the pessimists who doubt the government will take this course. He thinks Spain’s chronic inability to restart growth will lead it to contemplate a third option: splitting the euro zone asunder by withdrawing from the common currency.”The article finishes with another 30 or so paragraphs about the Spanish economic crisis, all fairly factual in nature.

Thus, Fidler sneaks assertions of one expert into a 2,000-word factual article about a different, but vaguely related topic.  It’s the very technique the Times reporter used, but in Fidler’s case at least he gets an expert to say the myth he wants to spread. 

One expert and one expert only.

And, of course, the expert is from the notoriously right-wing American Enterprise Institute, which has as its stated mission “to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism—limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate.”  The expert provides no facts, no studies, just his opinion.  The reporter provides nothing to substantiate the expert’s expertise.  

Fidler has tried to sneak the myth that the euro is dangerously close to failing into a factual article, just as Kulish tried to in his Times article on Germany’s attitude towards bailing out Greece earlier this month.  Someone is plying these journalists into being accomplices in spreading what at this point is almost a lie.  Who could it be?

Of course it would be very convenient for the U.S. economy if many people believed that the euro was going under.  It would forestall thoughts of replacing the dollar as the bedrock currency of the world economy.  It would likely send many investors running to the dollar for safety.  If the euro really went under, it would turn one of our principal economic competitors into a bunch of smaller, far weaker competitors, none with the power to challenge the U.S. that the EU has.  Yes, many people in the U.S. would love to see the euro break apart.  But it’s not going to happen.  It’s just wishful thinking, a jingoistic pipedream.

It will be interesting to see if this false notion of the failing euro takes root in the media and the public.  If it does, it will certainly lead to regrettable business and economic decisions.  Unfortunately, wishing does not make it so, and when you make business  or political decisions based on fallacious information, you usually fail.

The local Pittsburgh media has reported about a young lady at one of the branches of the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) recently registered a new campus organization, the CCAC branch of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.

Yes, you heard it right. Students for Concealed Carry on Campus! It’s an organization that wants to allow college students to carry concealed hand guns on college campuses, with proper licensing of course. 

Currently CCAC and virtually all other colleges and universities ban firearms, and with good reason.  Traditional college students and those who live on campus for the most part are still completing the transition from childhood to adulthood.  They are on their own for the first time, and often ready to break free of their former lives or their parent’s beliefs.  Many are still learning how to read other people’s words and actions.   While many college kids are studious, most start drinking for the first time, and many practice the ancient art of binge-drinking.  Many do drugs. There is a high rate of adjustment problems, including depression.  There’s lots of sex and everyone’s horny, which sometimes can lead to jealousy or misunderstood motives.  While many college students show remarkably good common sense, some do very foolish things that they won’t be telling their own children about in future decades.

It seems irrational to want to bring firearms into this potent mix.  The only thing that can come of it are more innocent bodies bubbling blood through bullet holes.

Which brings us to the organization, Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, which I am going to shorten to Stu-Con for the purpose of writing this blog.  On the website, http://concealedcampus.org, Stu-Con describes itself thusly:

“Students for Concealed Carry on Campus is a national, non-partisan, grassroots organization comprising over 42,000 college students, professors, college employees, parents of college students, and concerned citizens who believe that holders of state-issued concealed handgun licenses should be allowed the same measure of personal protection on college campuses that they enjoy virtually everywhere else.”

While regaining a right that they think has been taken from them is the objective identified in this mission statement, in fact much of the organization’s language and virtually all of its imagery focuses on self defense, i.e., shooting at someone.  There is a kind of Bernard Goetz subtext to the arguments and photography (Several decades ago, Goetz rode the New York subway with a loaded gun waiting for the chance to shoot a would-be thief or mugger; he ended up bagging four.)

Some example of this shooting mentality in the subtext of Stu-Con’s con:

• Every image on the website except for photos of the board of directors shows a young person firing a gun and not at a target.
• I have been to the Stu-Con website several times and until the visit I made while writing this entry the home page showed a montage of six posters, in all of which a young person was shooting at a bad guy, either for real or in a symbolic way. For example, one had two condoms and a woman firing a gun, with the caption, “What will deter your rapist from coming back for more?”  The poster montage was missing while I was writing the blog entry.  When I returned to the Stu-Con site a few hours later, there was only one poster, with the headline, “Which campus would a mass murderer pick?” and an image of a girl shooting and the caption “Armed Staff and Students” facing the image of a gun with a standard red “forbidden” icon over it and the caption “No Legal Guns Allowed.”
• Multiple repetitions of the assumption (fallacious) that carrying firearms reduces the rate of crime. By the way, Stu-Con admits that crime rates tend to be lower on the average college campus.
• Many inflammatory statements such as “Recent high-profile shootings and armed abductions on college campuses clearly demonstrate that ‘gun free zones’ serve to disarm only those law-abiding citizens who might otherwise be able to protect themselves” and “It is often claimed that students could not possibly react with the speed and proficiency required to take down an active shooter.  Neglecting the fact that these citizens (age 21 and older in most cases) already carry elsewhere and are trusted with that ability, as well as the fact that citizens are not required to perfect their skill in self-defense before exercising the right to self-defense, we present documented incidents of successful student self-defense.”

An interesting note: On its media page, there are no links to articles, only to YouTube versions of television news stories.  I guess it the Stu-Conners don’t believe college students read at all anymore. 

My assistant Colette contacted Stu-Con and asked three questions that are fairly standard, ones that most nonprofit organizations should be able to answer immediately.   I am assuming Stu-Con is a nonprofit because its URL ends in “.org,” and it takes a pretty slimy organization to register as an “.org” when it’s not a nonprofit.

Our questions, all of which Stu-Con’s Kurt Mueller refused to answer:

• Are you a nonprofit organization?
• Can you supply a list of your largest donors?
• What percentage of your 42,000 reported members are college students?

At the very best, Stu-Con comprises well-intentioned if slightly benighted young people who like carrying guns around and may be slightly trigger-happy.  At its worst, it’s another money-making rightwing con like the Tea Party convention and much Tea Party activity (see the second half of Frank Rich’s January 16 column).

Every once in a while, I feel the need to do some blog house-cleaning. 

Let’s start with the windows.

The blog has been getting a lot of comments lately, so I thought I should tell readers how we handle them:  My assistant Colette reviews each comment and then posts all except those which are pornography (rare so far) or bald-faced advertisements (often).  I don’t care if the comments are derogatory of my blog entries, nor if the language is vulgar: if someone took the time to write it, we will post it.

Sometimes I will respond to the person who posted the comment. I prefer to send a private and almost always short email rather than clog up the blogosphere by commenting on the comment in the public blog space.

Sometimes I will publish the comment and my response to it in a blog, which brings us to the stove, still a bit hot from a boiling controversy…

Yesterday, “Stacie” responded to one of my two blogs advocating negative population growth with the following comment: “so basically you’re a eugenicist? fuck you man, my husband and I are going to have all kinds of brilliant babies!!”

Stacie may not know what a eugenicist is or maybe she does and is trying to throw some mud at me with a big word.  So let’s clear the air: A eugenicist is interested in improving the hereditary characteristics of future generations through selective breeding.  I did not advocate that at all, nor mention anything that even came close to talking about it.  What I was proposing was birth control across the board, not selectively.  There’s a whiff of Nazism about applying eugenics to humans, so I want to make sure my position is clearly understood.    

Finally, some vacuuming in the basement: On February 11, I ripped Nicholas Kulish of the New York Times for beginning an article with an assertion of factual news and then never proving it; not even discussing it, just taking it for granted.  The assertion was that many (most) Germans are sorry that their country switched to the Euro.

Kulish went to the German EU well again, but not so deep, and this time his pail didn’t leak because he cited a survey.  Just a few days later, On February 15, Kulish wrote an article, which was not the lead article on the front page, reporting that opposition to the European Market bailout of Greece was growing in Germany.  In the new article he does cite a survey.  (Of course it’s a long way from being opposed to a bailout to regretting the switch to the Euro, which is unmentioned in the new article.)

I have no idea if he read my blog on his first German EU piece or not.  I’m just delighted that Nick has decided to return to the land of the reputable journalists.  Let’s hope he remains there.

The Associated Press reported yesterday afternoon that “President Barack Obama signed an order Thursday unilaterally creating a bipartisan commission to rein in unruly deficits after Congress rejected a similar body with considerably more enforcement power.

As I have said a few times and William Greider details in the January 25 issue of The Nation (posted on the Nation website on January 7), the force behind the bipartisan deficit commission is Pete Peterson and his pals, who have long clamored for gutting Social Security benefits.  Peterson, like many who dislike Social Security, pretends that it suffers from a deficit, which will get worse as baby boomers retire.  In fact, there is no Social Security deficit.  Social Security has a surplus that will last us many decades.

But under Reagan, Social Security began to loan its excess reserves to the federal government to help pay for the federal deficit. 

It is true that this year Social Security will pay out more than it takes in for the first time in 25 years, the first of many years that will occur as the baby boomers, those born 1946-1964, reach retirement age.  But as Paul Krugman has observed in several articles over the past few years, if the federal government pays back what it’s supposed to pay back, all Social Security needs is a quick fix or two, like raising the maximum salary subject to the Social Security tax.

But what if the bipartisan commission that President Obama creates follows the wishes of Peterson and other conservatives who want to use deficit cutting as an excuse for hacking Social Security into pieces?

Besides ruining the retirements of millions of working people, such a move would signal the first time the United States has ever defaulted on a debt.  We would lose all respect in the world, no one would want to lend us money for fear of another default and the dollar would soon be replaced by another currency as the basis of the world economy. 

Let’s work to make sure that never happens.  If you agree with me, do what I’m doing and send President Obama a letter or email asking him that in his charge to the commission that he asks them to recommend that the federal government pledges to pay back the Social Security system what it owes as the need to pay retirees and other recipients comes due. 

Also, tell your friends and relatives to write a letter to the President.  When the names of all commission members are announced I’m going request everyone to mail or email all the commission members telling them the same thing.

Earlier this week I proposed that by limiting everyone to one child each, in less than a century we could bring the world population down to 500 million, thereby ending both environmental and economic problems.

One reader asked quite aptly how I propose to do it. As the Burt Reynolds’ character says in “Semi-Tough,” Michael Ritchie’s 1980 send-up of the human potential movement, “I didn’t say it wasn’t going to be semi-tough.”

Conceptually, it’s easy: To change the behavior of vast numbers of people, it takes:

• Changes in attitudes and social mores
• Social pressure (the extreme form of the first point)
• Incentives or disincentives, such as taxes and tax credits
• Laws and regulations

To state the obvious, to get governments to create incentives, disincentives, laws and regulations, first there has to be a groundswell of support from somewhere, either a change of general mores or of the mores or goals of a ruling elite, e.g., a one-party government or a collection of corporations.

In the United States, a negative population growth (NPG) movement would begin with corporations and wealthy individuals using influence and grants to universities, think tanks, lobbying groups and foundations to create research, which would lead to public policy groups, government commissions and then coverage in the news media. The entire process was best described by that leftist professor G. William Domhoff in The Powers That Be, although the most frequent followers of his theories on how to achieve social change or control of public issues have been the right-wing. (And why not? The most ardent followers of the principles of capitalism as set down by Karl Marx in Capital (Das Capital) were Carnegie, Frick, Ford and other American industrialists.)

My history can get a little fuzzy at times, but I believe that prohibition, welfare reform and regulating cigarettes all came about because of this process.

A recent example of what Domhoff calls the “policy-formation” process is the way that Pete Peterson and his cohorts have been investing in research and commissions for the purpose of gutting the Social Security system. So far, his efforts have failed: Congress did not approve forming his proposed commission to investigate ways to address the federal deficit, which, as a number of columnists have pointed out, is a thinly veiled attempt to get at Social Security. But to get the Obama Administration to support the commission, he followed this policy formation process that starts with monied folks commissioning research that proves what they want to do is the right thing.

But can enough people (or enough people with clout) become convinced that we need to shrink our population? Hasn’t the economic well-being of many and the accelerating accumulation of wealth by a few depended too long on continually growing our population? Doesn’t that create a tremendous impediment to change?

I’ll answer that question in two ways:

1.  There are many examples of dramatic changes in attitude and mores of people over time.  Some examples:

• Slavery was once practiced ubiquitously.  It took millennia, but now it’s forbidden everywhere.  
• It also took centuries to end the custom of taking more than one wife.
• The cultural attitude in the United States towards women in the workplace in the U.S. changed dramatically from 1960 to 1975 (see Gail Collins, When Everything Changed).
• At the beginning of 19th century, infanticide was the preferred form of birth control in France (see Graham Robb, The Discovery of France) and abortion was a common procedure that didn’t bother most people and was often sued for birth control (see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine).

2.  We are already seeing some countries experiment with NPG.  The Chinese approach had a bad rep; the social control aspects of it don’t bother me because I also see social control in western countries, but I am profoundly disturbed by the fact that the Chinese reacted by not having female children.  The current NPG status of both Germany and Italy and the general slowdown in population throughout western Europe suggests to many observers that as people rise economically and gain personal freedom they tend to have fewer children.  Of course, the recent rise in U.S. birth rates may belie that theory or prove it in the negative, i.e., people in the U.S. are losing ground economically and reacting by having more children.

The big challenge again is that so many people think that their economic well-being depends on growth and NPG will by definition lead to a shrinking economy.  But many people were invested in horse-and-buggies, vinyl records and Florida real estate.  In the part of the world economy that’s a free market, it’s just part of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction of capitalism.”  And in the part of the economy that’s managed, it’s just a social policy objective that requires management.  The hard part will be getting people to think straight about this issue, to understand that environmental pressures and resource shortages will reduce the population by violent and unsavory means unless we do it rationally first.

But I didn’t say it wasn’t going to be semi-tough!

Today let’s go big picture and look at some pressing global problems and my conceptually simple solution to them:

As Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the U.S. and worldwide, we face an excess of productive capacity that presses wages downward everywhere.  Lower wages means that owners and investors keep more of the wealth created by the economy.  Helped along by artificially low tax rates, this excess of productive capacity redistributes wealth upwards unless there are social constraints to prevent income polarization, as exist in western Europe.  From the Roman Empire to Mughal India, Spain in the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire, various Chinese dynasties to 21st century United States, history teaches us that when incomes polarize, then rapid economic decline soon follows.

Here are the ways to increase the need for labor:

• The market solution, which is preferred by most large industrial concerns and very wealthy people; that means to grow markets, open new markets, create new products for existing markets. 
• The government solution, e.g., raising minimum wages, lowering maximum work times, mandating additional workers to perform government-required work, raising the basic standard of living that society guarantees to all such as education and medical care.  All attempts in this area are routinely met with great resistance by those who like market solutions and the mainstream and rightwing media they own or control through advertising purchases.

Note that in Europe and increasingly in China and Brazil, governments are employing combinations of both these strategies.

But spreading the wealth around in either of these ways pushes against the other major problem facing the U.S. and the world: the impact of humans on the earth, especially the inexorably accelerating spew of additional carbon into the environment.  Give more people relative wealth and they will create more pollution.  In world summits, this problem plays out as rich nations versus poor ones, developed versus nondeveloped, north versus south.  

My conceptually simple solution to both these problems is to shrink the population.  We know for a fact, again from a close reading of history that after a rapid depopulation economic good times soon follow as the cost of labor goes up and more people have money to spend.  The classic example is 14th century Europe after the bubonic plague wiped out about half the population.

Depopulation usually occurs because of some disaster: war, famine, disease.  But why does it have to be that way?

Suppose, for the sake of dreaming, that every person in the world today would have just one child.  Since having a child takes two parents, in about a generation the population would begin to naturally fall and within a century, we would have somewhere between 500 million to one billion people in the entire world.  With a century of investment into recycling, solar, wind, biofuel, smart grid and other technologies, we could very easily support a billion people with a fairly comfortable western middle class lifestyle.

But what of the transition costs, some may ask.  Remember that in most places, people have it drummed into their head that the only good economy is one that is growing.  But what if we know that the economy is going to shrink because there will be fewer people to serve?  It’s such an easy problem to address.  We merely do all the stuff mentioned in the two bullets above: let the market work and let government redistribute wealth and guide social and economic policy.

Now as the population shrinks, labor shortages will grow everywhere, as there will be fewer young people always entering at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder while the upward part of the ladder will always be relatively larger.  The number of people retired and supported by the workforce will also be relatively larger but that impact will be offset by a small population of children to serve.  But we know in advance professions serving the elderly will grow and those serving children will shrink and so can plan.

Additionally, developed nations can readily fill their labor shortages with people from the undeveloped world.  Western Europe has been doing just that as its native populations start to decline, e.g. in Italy and Germany.  It’s too bad that many of the locals and some governments in western Europe are reacting to the newcomers so poorly.  After all, it is this instream of immigrants that can enable the world to make a painless transition to a shrunken human population. 

But the last point I want to make about the transition costs of peaceful negative population growth is that whatever they are, they’re better than war, famine or disease.  

Humans are pushing against the upper limits of the earth’s carrying capacity for the current incarnation of our species, and natural history tells us that this situation typically leads to decline or outright extinction.  We can “rightsize” our species in a peaceful way or we can make a lot of people suffer.  I vote for peace and therefore endorse all efforts to reduce our population.

A lot of wishful thinking goes on in articles that purport to be news.  I’m talking about the kind of article that speculates that a trend is forming that will be positive to the interests of the U.S.  But when you read the article carefully, you see that it’s built on a series of conjectures and the opinions of one or two people with a vested interest in the prediction coming true.  No real facts.   

In the past, there have been wishful “it’s so because we say it’s so” articles about many topics:  violence ending in Iraq;, various national troops becoming ready to take a larger role in the defense of their countries; proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; Chinese economic weakness; and even sighting economic green shoots sprouting and signaling the end of the deep recession.

For a classic example of these stories spun from the gossamer of wishful thinking, check out the lead story on the front page of the New York Times. 

The story is titled “Germany, Forced to Buoy Greece, Rues Euro Shift” and the first paragraph plus reads:

“As Europe edges toward emergency guarantees to stem market panic over one of the most profligate members of the euro bloc, the country that the region turns to for leadership, Germany, is suffering from growing doubts about the European experiment it long championed.”

But the rest of the article is about something else.  The reporter, Nicholas Kulish, makes no attempt to offer any facts to substantiate the supposed premise of the article—that the Germans regret having converted to the euro. 

The remainder of the article concerns the fact that German leaders know that Germany and France must take lead roles in helping Greece, but for the time being they are not talking about what they might do, a tactic that is suppose to put pressure on the Greek government.  The article does quote from someone who was opposed to the conversion to Euros and someone else whom we are supposed to assume was also opposed to it, but neither says anything about being opposed to it at the current time nor that they have heard a groundswell of people sorry that Germany made the move.

Although the article repeats many times that opposition to being on the euro is growing in Germany, the writer provides not one shred of evidence that it is so.  Everything else he writes in the article is well-substantiated, so that most readers may not even see that the basic assertion of the article is unproven.