Concerning WesBurt's posting of 28 Nov 1998, I wish to make an observation,
if I may. Admittedly I have come lately to this discussion and may be
missing something here, but I appears to me that WesBurt is pointing to the
fact that implementation of the optimum policy appears to result in lower
birth rates and declaring such is an argument against the optimum policy.
Most experts in population studies, family planning, and those engaged in
forecasting available food and other resources favor population control in
the form of individual families consciously determining the number of
children they plan to have.
Practically all studies show that education and higher standards of living
result in lower population growth, while peoples living in conditions of
insecurity and devastating, chronic poverty tend to have many children.
Because these many children lead shortened lives of sickness, starvation
and, in general, ruinous deprivation, a major objective is to give these
people reasons to have fewer children. The fact that higher standards of
living inevitably lead to family-planned, and normally lower, birth rates is
considered a major plus, and further, such result is one of the major
objectives of education in third world countries.
Forgive me if I have misunderstood Wesburt's argument, but surely, lower
birth rates is an argument for, not against, implementation of the optimum
policy.
Kind Regards,
Rita Marie Goering
c/o Muriel L. Bonine (whose workstation I currently use)
-----Original Message-----
From: WesBurt@aol.com <WesBurt@aol.com>
To: 3way@socrates.netnexus.org <3way@socrates.netnexus.org>;
uk-policy@socrates.netnexus.org <uk-policy@socrates.netnexus.org>
Cc: WesBurt@aol.com <WesBurt@aol.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 28, 1998 3:54 PM
Subject: uk-policy Who Wants A Second-Best Public Policy For The U.K. and
the U.S.?
(Keeping your original, I am deleting all but the referenced paragraph here
to save traffic weight on the server - RMG)
>Hi folks,
>
>Before Who can be identified, definitions of three grades of public policy
are
>needed:
>
>
>My previous note of 98-10-22, (Tax or Subsidize, which produces the desired
>result?), presented empirical data from the World Bank's 1996 ATLAS on the
>birth rates of 32 nations to suggest that oppressive taxes, which fall
short
>of deliberate genocide, are not the most effective way to persuade people
to
>have fewer children. To the contrary, the nations which adopted the
optimum
>policy (TOP) above have birth rates of 0.5%/year or lower, while nations
that
>enforced the second best public policy, including those (Canada and
Australia)
>who had allowed their TOP to be eroded by the great inflation of the 1970s
and
>1980s, had birth rates of 1.5%/year and higher. This empirical data on
birth
>rates contradicts the popular adage, "If you tax something you get less of
>it," as well as the popular adage, "If you subsidize something you get more
of
>it."
>
>Sincerely,
>
>WesBurt
>
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