- A book Review
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- Re: The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 by Joel
Kotkin
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- Part 2: Inane projections, degradation of critical thinking
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- Joel Kotkin wrote a book celebrating America's projected
100 million population growth by 2050. From our current 310 million to
400 million! Other reports ("US Population Projections" by Fogel/Martin)
show 100 million added within 25 years and 138 million in 40 years.
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- Kotkin promotes inane projections and degradation of
critical thinking.
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- Critic "Mark" on a review on www.amazon.com,
said, "I wanted to like this book. I really did. But between the author's
arrogant dismissal of Jane Jacobs, and his holding up of Phoenix as a great
American city, I'm really disappointed. He completely fails to connect
that the physicality of a city defines what that city becomes, and thinks
that Las Vegas will be the new New York just because a bunch of people
move there. His view of urbania is slightly above contempt. He ignores
the political polarization now splitting America, or how it influences
people's habitat choices, or how the automobile completely redefined how
people live. In short, a simplistic, deeply lacking book."
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- THE FUTURE ECONOMIC LANDSCAPE
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- "America's continuing demographic vitality will
drive its economic resilience in the coming decades," said Kotkin.
"but over time the rise in births, producing a generation larger than
the boomers, will add to the workforceimmigrants will no doubt play a leading
role in the next economic transition."
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- Since we already suffer 15 million unemployed American
workers, how does Kotkin create jobs for another 100 million people? Out
of his imagination?
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- He talks about those immigrants, but let's pitch him
a reality fastball: today, each year, over 2.0 to 2.4 million legal and
illegal immigrants arrive annually into America from countries where illiteracy
remains the model as a cultural norm. Of the next 100 million, demographers
show that 70 million will be third world immigrants. They arrive so fast
and in such great numbers that our educational systems cannot educate them.
Thus, we create a permanent subclass of illiterates.
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- Today, according to the National Reading Foundation,
we already suffer 42 million functionally illiterate adults and 50 million
adults that cannot read past the 4th grade level. Already heavily
immigrated, Detroit, Michigan suffers a 76 percent dropout/flunkout rate
from high schools according to NBC's Brian Williams. How does Kotkin think
that will improve with 70 million third world immigrants? By magic?
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- WE ARE ALREADY OVERPOPULATED IN THE USA
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- This will prove the most important quote of the 21st century:
"Every cause is a lost cause without limiting human overpopulation."
Paul Ehrlich
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- While Ehrlich suffered great scorn from his Population
Bomb in 1968 because of the temporary 'Green Revolution'-it's over and
will never again save us from sheer human overpopulation. Since 1968, "A
series of things have come up since then that have made the problem incredibly
grimmer. The ozone hole acid rain. Three hundred million people have
starved to death since THE POPULATION BOMB was written. The famines
weren't as large as agriculturists thought they would be due to the spread
of Green Revolution technology into the poor countries. What makes us nervous
right now is that we're faced with again having to do something desperate
to increase our food production greatly.... In 1965 we knew exactly how
to do it, the question was could we deploy it fast enough-Today we have
nothing left to deploy-that's very scary.... As a species we're not able
to live on our income; we're living on our capital, our deep rich agricultural
soils are being destroyed, water is being over-pumped, and our biodiversity,
our life support system-we're already far beyond what we can support."
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- Yet, Kotkin staggers forward with laptop in hand; plunders
onward like a drunken sailor on a ship headed for the nearest reef. He's
too drunk to understand his own destiny or his inability to think straight.
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- But he thinks we desire to sail on the same ship with
him. Wrong! I witnessed what Kotkin proposes in my world travels and
I wouldn't sail on anything he proposes if my life depended on it.
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- KOTKIN PRAISES LOS ANGELES AS A FABULOUS EXAMPLE OF A
FUTURE CITY
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- "Yet Los Angeles, which possessed a mere hundred
thousand inhabitants at the turn of the 20th century, has emerged
as the essential model for the 21st century city," Kotkin bragged.
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- He forgot to mention LA's 20,000 member "18th Street
Gang" that murders, rapes and distributes drugs along with growing
MS-13 gangs proliferating in the city. He forgot to mention that LA's
schools, once in the top five of the nation, now hunker down to the bottom
five of the nation. Over half the kids do not graduate from high school
and illiteracy runs rampant. Over 80 percent of the child births stem
from immigrant illiterate mothers that leap onto the welfare wagon. Annual
costs to U.S. taxpayers in total: $346 billion annually across 15 federal
agencies according to Edwin Rubenstein Report. (Source: www.thesocialcontract.com )
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- Kotkin thinks New York leads as the 'aspirational archetype'
city on the eastern seaboard. If you love gridlocked traffic, honking taxis,
stacked-up-high living, concrete jungles, 100 different languages, a bottle
of Excedrin a day to keep the headache acceptable, insane crowding and
dirty air-be my guest.
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- As John Muir said, "Tell me what you will of the
benefactions of city civilization, of the sweet security of streets-all
as part of the natural upgrowth of man towards the high destiny we hear
so much of. I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air,
and the scenes in which pure air is found. If the death exhalations that
brood the broad towns in which we so fondly compact ourselves were made
visible, we should flee as from a plague. All are more or less sick; there
is not a perfectly sane man in San Francisco." (That applies to any
mega American city!)
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- Yet, Kotkin cannot wait for New York City to add another
five million to its concrete jungle quagmire!
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- Wonder if he's ever read Pulitzer Prize winner Jared
Diamond's book: Collapse: How Societies Succeed or Fail? Richard
Heinberg's: Peak Everything-Facing a Century of Declines ; Dr. Albert Bartlett's:
"Sustainability, Energy, Population" and Dr. William Catton's
Overshoot?
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- Obviously not!
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