Current location:	Herndon, VA
Current mood:	thoughtful
Current music:	none

History only matters after the fact
New York has to be good for something. This week, there are two interesting articles in NY publications.

First, this article on the demographics of fertility in the NYT magazine is interesting, although I think that the author does make one category error. He talks about the Scandinavian birthrate (the highest in Europe, at 1.8) and the US birthrate (2.3) and treats them as polar opposites of successful policy / culture. However, 2.1 is replacement, so Scandinavia has to be viewed as only "less bad" than the rest of Europe (which is hovering around 1.3).

Or, if you're a misanthrope, then the US would be the bad one, because Scandinavia is still on track to have fewer people over the long term... I'm glad to see that Paul Erlich, the doomsayer par excellence got quoted, so that still more people can get exposed to the lunacy of his ideas. Seriously, how many times does someone have to be spectacularly wrong before folks stop listening to them?

Second, this opinion piece in the WSJ is refreshing: perhaps Heinlein is right: "history doesn't repeat itself; historians do." I like his point that pessimism is really a luxury of affluence - if things were nearly as dire as the pessimists believe, we wouldn't have time for all that.