i've said if before...

Back in high school and college, I remember always being involved in an argument. Generally the argument usually began because I would object to whomever's spurious belief that we had reached an information zenith and now that we knew everything we could predict everything. History used to call them planners but now we call them progressives or environmentalists or any other shade of left that presupposes to know that the world is as it should be and as they wish it to be. The actual argument itself was never really important. Nothing was ever discussed, and that for me, was usually the biggest disappointment. To discuss something with someone who assumes that their opinion is not just right, but prima facie more important that your opinion is not discussing; it's ramming your head against a brick wall. The one thing that would usually irritate someone of this ilk the most was when I would suggest that we would soon not be facing overpopulation, but underpopulation.
The look on each of their faces. Wow. Give me just a moment.
"How can you even suggest that? Aren't you aware of all the people in the world who live on less than a dollar a day and the women in underdeveloped countries who don't have access to contraception?"
And so on and so forth. To which I would always reply, if the world was getting overpopulated, then wages indexed to inflation would be falling. In other words, the more people there are, the less the value of everyone's service because there are so many more of them. Yet wages continue to rise across the world, primarily because people, highly trained, knowledgable, capable people and people to work in every sector of the market, are highly in demand. We are facing a catastrophe of epic proportions, we are facing underpopulation.
That would usually end the conversation, as they would declare me an fanatical conservative evangelical unfit to exist in the postmodern world. Never mind that I am neither fanatical, conservative or evangelical. But now Stanley Kurtz, research fellow at the Hoover Institute, has confirmed what Julian Simon and other's predicted a long time ago--that all of the industrialized world and soon the developing world will all be facing demographic changes that the world has never before faced.
What's the lesson here? We do not and will never be at an information zenith where we are aware of everything that is going around us and our impact and effect upon everything. In other words we will always be forced to re-evaluate our positions. Ideology only makes that process that much harder, because it forces into a rigorous set of beliefs that cannot be changed. The Reactionary Left, or as I prefer to call them, the Demagogue Democrats, and especially the environmental wing, will be hard pressed to accept such notions without actually being excited. Finally they say, fewer people. I say the more people the better--the more people we have working on our problems, even if some of our problems are caused by having more people, the better off humanity will be in the long term. A growing population is a dynamic population--a shrinking population is a doomed one.