QotD: Shibboleths of the 60's

I'm not unsympathetic to those who favor a constitutional amendment prohibiting all baby boomers from public office. It's amazing to me how many institutions remain entirely in thrall to the received wisdom of 40 years ago — scarcity of "resources", world "overpopulation", the growing "inequality" between the rich countries and the "Third World".

None of these things exist. The UN now says the planet's population will peak in mid-century, and in many parts of the developed world it's already in decline: the problem Germany faces, for example, is not "sustainable growth" but sustainable lack of growth. Meanwhile, the last three decades have seen the emergence of what Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin calls "a new world middle class" made up of over 2.5 billion people in developing lands who now have a standard of living near enough that of the west. So about half the folks in the so-called "poor countries" are, in fact, doing pretty nicely. As Virginia Postrel put it, if you take the planet as a whole, in 1998 "the largest number of people earned about $8,000 — a standard of living equivalent to Portugal's."

Mark Steyn, "Thinking Globally", National Review, 2007-09-21