Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 19:10:28 -0500 From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: William B Ward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: FW: Breeding, was: Re: FW: The structure of future work... My understanding from Darwin's "Variation of Behaviour of Plants and Animals under Domestication" is that the more a species is threatened with extinction, the more vigourous its energy is directed to propagation. With us humans, (focused as we are on self preservation more than on species preservation or even civilization preservation) the threat to survival extends to the threat to the survival of ourselves in our present circumstance. This leads to some pretty bizarre behaviour. Ed G =================== William B Ward wrote: > > The following comments are simply the words of the entitled. People have > kids since they are the best life insurance policy there is for many > people in the world. A guy by the name of Mamdani did a study in India > of government, Rockefeller and Ford foundation family practices and found > that the larger the family the more wealth. Children provide surplus > labor in the developing world. Another thing to remember is that rich > kids use a heck of a lot more resources than poor kids so it should be > the rich who limit their family size. I doubt if the ratio is still > valid as India moves to have the world's largest middle class but at one > point the average American used 50 times the raw resources as the average > Indian. When you figure that the Indian population is 3.5 to 4 times the > size of the US population, you can see where the arguments about the poor > needing to control the number of the children they have is spurious. It > is certainly better for the poor to gamble on having more children and > hoping that one makes it than to spend money on lottery tickets. > > Bill Ward, President > International Marketing Services > mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.ims7.com > http://www.planetall.com/main.asp?cid=6681447 > > On Thu, 20 Jan 2000 12:35:50 -0800 pete <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > >Good question. I've often thought that a lot of > > >"working class" persons could have had a better life > > >style had they not had children. [snip] I have long since understood and fully agreed with this argument. I was speaking *only* about the working poor in 1st world nations, or, maybe, *only* in The United States of Amerika (<-- as Kafka spelled it). At age 18, a young man can buy a fancy car. At age 50 he can no longer -- largely because he has taken on "responsibilities" which is a synonym in most cases for *children*. Absolutely: In the poor nations such as India, children as the only form of social security for the poor. (Thus we see another illustration of Alice Miller's thesis of the psychoanalytic wheel of karma: each generation inflicting on the next what was inflicted on it.) So, let me here write the two words I erased from my original posting: Never again. Which, of course, is a prescriptive, not a descriptive sentence. "Yours in discourse [which is a luxury]..." \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- <![%THINK;[XML]]> Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ Peace and goodwill Ed Goertzen, Oshawa
