Category: Bibliography

Malthusian destiny

Opinion: “Malthusian destiny”

nyti.ms/2Sn7929

Malthusianism is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off.
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NYTimes: Teenagers Are Struggling, and It’s Not Just Lockdown

Teenagers Are Struggling, and It’s Not Just Lockdown nyti.ms/3h7gvJE

While many experts believe that the reason adolescents are struggling today is that they’re away from friends and school, a closer look at the research reveals a more complicated picture. According to psychologists who study adolescent resilience, one of the biggest threats to the well-being of today’s teenagers is not social isolation but something else — the pressure to achieve, which has intensified over the past year.

Psychologists define resilience as the ability to adapt well to stress. For decades, they have studied why some kids are more resilient in adversity than others. Suniya Luthar, emerita professor of psychology at Columbia’s Teachers College and a leading resilience researcher, believes the pandemic is a “natural experiment” that can help answer that question: When you expose adolescents to an event that changes their lives significantly, how do they cope?

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NYTimes: Here’s My Novel Idea for the Republican Party

Here’s My Novel Idea for the Republican Party nyti.ms/32TnlKw

ROSS DOUTHAT

A few months ago, it was an open question whether once Donald Trump vacated the presidency, the idea of a more populist right-wing economic policy would disappear with him.

Trump was a lazy, inconsistent populist, but he still tethered his party to the idea that Republicans should stand for some sort of “working class” politics, some kind of policy that prized American wage earners as well as corporations and the rich. But under his Democratic successor, it was possible to imagine populism going the way of compassionate conservatism in the Tea Party era, as the G.O.P. just cycled back to complaining about deficits.

Some Republicans have made that journey. But a few months into Joe Biden’s presidency, we can also say that the populist impulse remains alive, and the G.O.P.’s Trump -era repositioning with it.

You can see this in two ways. First, Republican Senate moderates keep making counteroffers to the Biden administration’s big-ticket spending proposals: $618 billion for Covid-19 relief in February, $568 billion for infrastructure last week. Compared with the ambition of the Democratic plans, these seem like very modest offers. Compared with the line that Republicans took for most of the Obama presidency, though, they represent a dramatic shift, with a combined price tag far beyond Obama’s $787 billion in stimulus spending, which Republicans back then denounced as profligacy or socialism.

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