Such a notion runs completely counter to my childhood and present experiences with large Catholic families of a wide variety of ethnic stock.
I'm not saying that you are taking a neo-Malthusian/natural scarcity position but your argument sounds just like the folks who try to take the K and R strategies abstracted from animal reproduction strategies and then apply them to human population models that "explain" why modern, industrial, capitalist democratic civilizations which practice Protestant and Victorian self-control have made "the demographic transition" and why backwards, self-provisioning, peasant-based authoritarian peasant cultures which are immoral and over-sexed (though they CAN keep a beat and jump high) keep on reproducing like rabbits - the latter groups values, planning and efficiencies are completely premodern and their population explosion threatens, by means of the tragedy of the commons, the supply of natural resources necessary for the advance of civilization. This argument was brutalized by Marx and dissected by David Harvey, in a great 1974 article, by Francis Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins in World Hunger: Ten Myths (and, later by Lappe and Rachel Schurmann in Taking Population Seriously, which stresses gender power analysis) and Michael Goldman in his own work and an edited volume, Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons.) -- disclaimer, I went to grad school with Michael , TA'd for Joe (who I'd met, along with Lappe, during my time at The Friends of the Earth) and am friends with Rachel because she married Michael - at least in part because both had worked for Food First, under Lappe and Collins.)
For all their problems, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts have had staggeringly positive results...
A
On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 2:18 PM, martin <mschiller at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> Much of the thread dealt with the issue of protecting children (security),
> and I think that the aspect of scarcity/value that I was attempting to
> address was related to family size across class lines. More kids, lower
> value/kid. IOW kids have become precious. A result of this is that parents
> are much more reactive to the catalyst of fear, and the result is over
> protective behavior. (Your point about 'concerted cultivation' seems to me
> to be class-specific.) The scarcity is in part the result of two income
> households/careerism single parenthood combined with an environment that has
> contributed to a perception of widespread infertility.
>
> martin
>
> your comments about the Passaic river brought to mind the river in
> Bridgeport (Pequonnock?) that drew us as kids in the early 50s. My father
> told stories about bringing home fish he had caught there and his mother
> throwing the fish in the garbage - he had fished from the pipe that
> discharged raw sewage into the river. By the time that I played at the
> river, we were able to throw bricks from the same sewer pipe and have the
> bricks splash mud and then float on that mud. No water for fish - just muck.
> But by the time my kids came along, the river had been cleaned and there
> were once again fish - though I doubt that anyone would consider eating
> them. I remember reading about fish returning to the hudson river some time
> back - and I think that both of those 'fish' stories brought some optimism
> to my outlook.
>
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