![Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by [Bricker, Darrell, Ibbitson, John]]({"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41F4YqHH5UL.jpg":[323,500],"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41F4YqHH5UL._SY346_.jpg":[224,346]})
I cannot recommend this book. The subject is one that I know well and have studied professionally around the world. Although the facts this book presents are mostly accurate, they are highly selective and presented along with strong opinions about the political implications as though no other point of view can be credible. This book is a form of propaganda, masquerading as information.
Fertility declines are due to multiple factors, but the authors only include causes that fit their argument. They never mention or quantify the impact of abortions on the falling fertility in the US (the number of abortions is about equal to the number of immigrants that replace the unborn). The authors mention that fertility has declined the most in black communities but fail to acknowledge this is because of higher rates of abortions among blacks.
Nor do the authors assess the causes of fertility decline objectively. Women’s empowerment is claimed to be a root cause of declining fertility. In fact, fertility falls especially fast in Latin America where female empowerment is limited. They describe the fall in foreign adoptions as a trend, though actually it is due to the Hague Treaty that almost completely ended foreign adoptions by cutting off the prior path to citizenship for adopted children. A reader that is new to the subject would never be able to discern when they were getting the whole truth, and the authors work hard to conceal this.
The authors skip over the negatives of the mass migration they prescribe. They don’t mention the huge disenfranchised underclasses that have been created in Asia and the Middle East based on the policies they recommend. Nor the emergence of similar underclasses in California today. They don't mention the impossibility of enforcing the rule of law when transnational criminal organizations exploit open borders. They even fail to present the positives of Japan's choices to preserve their homogeneous society, despite that fact that Japan continues to pursue this policy and must see some benefit.
These Canadian authors present the Canadian approach as a panacea. They don't acknowledge the Canadian situation is unique geographically, because the United States provides protection through strategic depth. Critically, the Canadian immigration system is merit based, but they fail to include this in their prescription. Instead that authors answer is simply to resist Donald Trump and any political point of view that attempts to protect the interests of a country’s citizens.
What I found most offensive was that they didn’t make a recommendation and try to defend it, rather they gave a prescription as though they know more than the rest of us and have higher moral standards than we can only accept as absolute. I found the unscholarly, ideological mindset of the authors sickening.
This is an important topic that deserves a fact-based discussion. But for that discussion to be helpful, options need to be considered objectively and pros/cons acknowledged from the perspectives of all constituents. Instead we get selective facts to fit a predefined narrative with extensive condescending rants, hurling insults at those that would questing their prescription in any way.
- File Size: 2962 KB
- Print Length: 252 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1984823213
- Publisher: Crown (February 5, 2019)
- Publication Date: February 5, 2019
- Language: English
- ASIN: B07CWHYVW5
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Text-to-Speech:
Enabled
- Word Wise: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#173,680 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #18 in Demography
- #95 in Demography Studies
- #216 in Cultural Anthropology (Kindle Store)
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