good book, slightly on-topic

John Larkin · 2016-12-27T16:47:58+00:00

One Child, by Mei Fong. This is about the history and consequences of the insane Chinese one-child policy. It's in the first person; the author spends time with real victims of the program. Two things are sort of on-topic. One is the nature of the spoiled brats that the policy created, a generation of "Little Emperor" non-risk-takers. The other is how the policy was born. This was in the heyday of cruel Malthusian stupidity like Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" book and Mao's Cultural Revolution. Mao emptied the universities and industries of all the smart people and sent them out to farm millet or something. But he wanted ICBMs, so the only scientific institution untouched was the rocket scientists. Some of them decided to do social engineering and wrote some population simulation models to run on their primitive computers. They decided that the only way to prevent population catastrophe and widespread starvation was one-child; Mao was doing a pretty good job on the starvation thing already. They ignored the few social science people who objected, because computer models are obviously perfect. -- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com

Dec 27, 2016 36 Replies

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Steve Wilson 9 years ago

Very good answers. Thank you.

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krw 9 years ago

You obviously don't understand much. You've proven it.

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Tom Gardner 9 years ago

You're not the first to reach that conclusion.

A tell-tale on this group is to spot those with potty mouths and those that frequently use irrelevant (and incorrect) political labels.

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