pop

What mystifies me about the population bombers and mebbe some people on
this list is that they don't realize -- literally, don't realize -- the
racism, cultural or psychological, that underlies their theory. They start
out from the premise that certain categories of people can't control their
sexual urges and this is why they have too many babies. Birth rate
statistics and the like are aggregating masses of individual decisions. If
the decisions that the average family (of whatever community) makes are
seen to be basically rational, and if (as is the case) birth controil
praqctices of one sort or another are universal in all cultures, and if (as
is the case) the chances of having more babies than they want are about
equal to the chanes of having fewer babies than they want -- then
population growht becomes a dependent variable. Stated differently: people
roughly calculate the chances of children surviving to adulthood and
usually make decisions on the basis of such calculations. 

Malthus was wrong, but remember, too, he was a famous racist.

Jim Blaut