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… is from page 288 of 1992 Nobel-laureate Gary Becker [2]’s and Guity Nashat Becker’s 1997 book, The Economics of Life [3]:
Third World populations expanded rapidly because children and adults live much longer than they did even a few decades ago, not because families are having more babies. They are having fewer babies. How can one lament population growth due to dramatically fewer deaths from malnutrition and contagious diseases?
DBx: How indeed? Yet it is today de rigueur among progressives and environmentalists to decry population expansion. These intellectuals – widely believed, especially by themselves – to be unusually enlightened and humane, are often willing to countenance policies designed to forcibly suppress the flourishing of human life on earth.
Most progressives and environmentalists are not naturally evil, but they are very frequently led to embrace evil policies by their utter ignorance of history and of economics (and, in some cases, by a simple inability to think straight combined with an addiction to emoting).