On Nov 14, 10:45 am, enigma wrote:
Beliavsky wrote groups.com:.

i think encouraging *anyone* to have 'lots of kids' is
irresponsible. i'm all for encouraging your children to choose
good, kind & hopefully intelligent partners (i'm a marriage
optional kind of person, but i know you aren't), but i think
even mentioning desire for potential grandchildren is, well,
rude & presumptuous.

On average, less intelligent and responsible people have
more kids than their opposites, and that's a bad thing for
society. Some people worry about global warming. I worry
about this.

the world is already at a breaking point for supporting the
human population.

Paul Ehrlich and others were making such arguments in the 1970s, but
since then world population has grown and living standards have
increased. More people means more ideas about how to use resources
efficiently, as Julian Simon said.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Lincoln_Simon
"His 1981 book The Ultimate Resource is a criticism of the
conventional wisdom on population growth, raw-material scarcity and
resource consumption. Simon argues that our notions of increasing
resource-scarcity ignore the long-term declines in wage-adjusted raw
material prices. Viewed economically, he argues, increasing wealth and
technology make more resources available; although supplies may be
limited physically they may be viewed as economically indefinite as
old resources are recycled and new alternatives are developed by the
market. Simon challenged the notion of a pending Malthusian catastrophe
-that an increase in population has negative economic consequences;
that population is a drain on natural resources; and that we stand at
risk of running out of resources through over-consumption. Simon
argues that population is the solution to resource scarcities and
environmental problems, since people and markets innovate. His
critique was praised by Nobel Laureate economists Friedrich Hayek &
Milton Friedman, the latter in a 1998 foreword to The Ultimate
Resource II, but has also attracted many critics, such as Paul R.
Ehrlich and Albert Bartlett ."

we should be aiming for less than zero
population growth. if we do so voluntarily now, we won't have
to have it forced on us later. with global climate changing &
a period of drought ongoing, we really should be utilizing our
so-called intelligence to figure out how to reduce our impact
on the ecosystem, not continue stomping along in our current
"manifest destiny" manner, and *certainly* not encouraging
'lots of children'!
lee