The Next Great Scare?

Blue Crab (who sports a cool new look) picks up on a great piece in the Washington Post about the threat to Japan of a falling population. Of course, Japan is in good shape compared to Russia, whose population is practically imploding. That troubled nation will see its population reduced by half by mid-century.

This is a good time to remember that media and the mob mentality seem to find a looming catastrophe in every barely-discerned trend. Popular perception today tells us that man lives on a knife edge, threatened by nuclear war, cataclysmic meteor strike, ice age, global warming, over-population, resource depletion, super-plague and who knows what else.

I'm looking forward to the day when the population explosion is no longer the great scare, but population implosion is. I'm too young to recall well the day when all those people writing articles about the coming ice age started instead to write about global warming, but I'll get to see and enjoy the shift from resource depletion to a lack of workers and lack of talented young minds.

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