>Improving the
>population is in my mind equivalent with improving society.
"Improving the population" can be a very scary concept. If it means feeding, clothing, and housing people who are already alive, I'm all for it. If it means using some sort of social or genetic criteria to control reproduction, you really are on the road to Auschwitz. Don't forget that the American eugenecists - who practiced their craft on black Americans and inferior sorts of Europeans - were a great inspiration to the Nazis. A phrase like Barro's "weeding out" is extremely revealing, and rhetorically very similar (though milder) than the language of Mein Kampf. But it has a long pedigree, going back at least to Margaret Sanger, who called for the removal of the "weeds...overrunning the human garden" and for the sterilization of "genetically inferior races," among whom she included the Chinese, who were "spread[ing] like a plague."
Doug