Joel Kotkin, Columnist and RC Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University - Spiked
Stephan: I found this a very interesting take on the worldwide population decline in births by a man who seems to be a scholar and a materialist. It is not just what it says, and the links to research sources it provides, which is good and useful, but also for what he does not say. Joel Klotkin seems to be on the conservative, although not MAGAt side, and he is definitely a materialist. That is he has no concept of the Matrix of Consciousness or the nonlocal nature of consciousness. My own view on why fewer people are marrying and having children is the precognitive, but unconscious, anxiety and fear created by the onrushing catastrophe of climate change, and the destruction of the earth's ecosystem caused both by human greed, and indifference to the matrix, and the climate change it is producing. I have done two podcasts on this because as I have been telling readers for decades now, the only way we are going to get through climate change and preserve the planet's ecosystems is by recognizing the matrix, and the fact that all life is interconnected and interdependent, and developing new technologies that do not degrade the ecosystems, and developing social policies that foster wellbeing at every level.
Over a decade ago, I led a team of Singapore-based researchers to investigate why families were declining. Back then, we were experiencing a historic shift away from population growth and familial ties, towards individualism. Since then, the post-familial age has entered full swing.
This situation would have been unthinkable in the 1960s, when ‘overpopulation’ was seen as inevitable. In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted that the number of people on Earth would rocket to unsustainable levels, resulting in global famine.
Yet the disaster Ehrlich predicted has not materialised. In fact, the trend is now reversing. Last year’s global population growth was the smallest since 1950. Far from humans breeding themselves out of existence, today almost half of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level. This week, the US Census announced the lowest birthrate in American history. Rather than relentlessly continuing to [...]
