Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'Demography'

November 25, 2014

The Power Of Youth, But Let’s Not Get Carried Away

The United Nations has just published its State of the World Population Report 2014, “1.8 Billion Strong: Adolescents, Youth and the Transformation of the Future.” I always enjoy a good read from the United Nations, and this does not fail to provide much fodder for discussion. Continue Reading...
July 18, 2014

Fewer Babies, Longer Lives

The Transom links today to a piece about how Proctor & Gamble is ramping up product lines aimed at older adults. “The flip side of the low birthrate is we’re all living longer,” said corporate exec Tom Falk. Continue Reading...
May 12, 2014

Want To Change A Nation? Give A Girl A Book

I don’t know any terrorists, but they seem to be very fearful people. They are afraid of new ideas, other religions, air strikes, and bathing. Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times, says that what terrorists are really afraid of are educated women. Continue Reading...
January 22, 2014

The Ever-Persistent, Always-Destructive Myth of Overpopulation

The Nordic philosopher and priest Anders Chydenius (1729-1803) — the “Adam Smith of the North” — once asked: Would the Great Master, who adorns the valley with flowers and covers the cliff itself with grass and mosses, exhibit such a great mistake in man, his masterpiece, that man should not be able to enrich the globe with as many inhabitants as it can support? Continue Reading...
February 15, 2013

America’s Looming Demographic Disaster

“Our world is overpopulated.” If you repeat something often enough, it becomes “truth”. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, warning that we’d all soon be fighting over food, space, and power as the earth sagged under the weight of all those darned people. Continue Reading...
March 09, 2012

Malthus and the Contraceptive Mandate

“The power of population,” wrote the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798, “is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” In other words, unless population growth is checked by moral restraint (refraining from having babies) or disaster (disease, famine, war) widespread poverty and degradation inevitably result. Continue Reading...