Backboards: 
Posts: 152
In response to ""Next" by Darrell Bricker - It's on Canadian attitude trends related to demographics/ "One Dumb Guy" by Paul Myers - Kids in the Hall bio -- nm" by Name Withheld By Request

Strong Recommendation: Bricker's last book, with John Ibbitson, is called "Empty Planet" and is on global population declines. -- (edited)

Chuck Klosterman nails it in his recommendation in the New York Times last year:

"It's common to read a book and learn something interesting. It's pretty rare to stumble across a book that convincingly introduces the possibility that our most basic assumptions about reality might be totally backwards. Yet that's what happened when I read Empty Planet: The Shock of Population Decline. The premise of Empty Planet, written by two Canadians, initially struck me as an attempt at performative contrarianism. How could it be possible that the earth's population is on the verge of dramatically decreasing? Isn't global overpopulation a virtual inevitability? To be totally honest, I only started reading the book to figure out what weird political underpinnings would prompt people to make such a curious claim. But it turns out there aren't any. There is no agenda here. This is a situation where the paradoxical premise slowly starts to seem obvious. What the authors describe is hard to deny—as the world becomes more and more westernized, the human replacement rate will eventually fall below 2.1, which statistically guarantees that the world's population in 100 years will be considerably less than it is today. I'm not sure why this book isn't getting more attention."

It's good.


Post a message   top
Replies are disabled on threads older than 7 days.