DEMOGRAPHY BY DEMAGOGUERY

Demography, the statistical study of human populations, belongs in this newsletter not so much because of its strong link with energy as by its abuse for pseudo-science and anti-technology. As with nuclear and other sciences, the brainwashers and fear peddlers rely on lack of knowledge. For example, the present growth in the older population is commonly attributed to the falling death rate and resulting increased longevity¾a phenomenon implicitly (and often quite explicitly) deplored by the population controllers. This is indeed one of the causes, but by no means the major one. The prime cause is quite simply the baby boom in the years prior to 1920--these babies are now in their mid-60s and early 70s, and nothing short of forcible extermination can change the present age profile of the population.

It is, in fact, the long delay between cause and effect¾just about one lifetime¾that is quite often not appreciated by those whom the population controllers have misled. Suppose next year some American Hitler began enforcing Paul Ehrlich's suggestion of coercive fertility control or David Brower's predicted "coercion...required to control population growth" or the Friends of the Earth's envisioned childbearing as "a punishable crime against society unless the parents hold a government license...all potential parents [being] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."(1) Then it would still take several decades before such benign environmentalist policies had a significant effect on the size of the US population. Most people alive today will still live three or four decades from now.