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"Learn them to read the Scriutures, and be conversant therein," the Reverend John Cotton urged his Boston parishio- ners in a 1656 homily on child rearing. "Reading brings much benefit to little Children."
"Benefit" was an understatement. In the harsh moral uni- verse of Cotton's New England Puritans, ignorance was no ex- cuse for sin: A child who died young (as many did) could ex- pect no mercy in the hereafter merely because he had not been able to read the Bible....
American relief groups. The developing world's poverty and hunger aroused sporadic concern in the West, but were not widely linked to population growth. Indeed, until the 1930s,
population grew faster in the West than in the poorer countries.
WQ WINTER 1986
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The world's population, increasing more than one million hu- man beings a week, reached a total of five billion in 1986. Since the time of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), scholars and philoso- phers have worried that population growth, if u...
. Here, Harvard's Nick Eberstadt examines the diverse economic effects of the much-publicized "population explo- sion." His surprising conclusion: The size and growth rate of a poor country's population are seldom crucial to its material pros- pects. What matters most, he contends, is how well a society and its leaders cope with change.
The world's poorer nations are in the midst of an unprecedented "population revolution." The revolution is occurring not in the deliv- ery room,...
ot;The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars, and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a blessing to- overcrowded nations, since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race." So wrote the Christian theologian Tertullian during the second century A.D., when the earth's population was only about 300 million-or six percent of what it is today (five billion).
Tertullian's observation, and the book in which it appears-Garrett Hardin's
Population, Evolution and Birth Control...
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Shortly after receiving the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature, Colom- bian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez remarked upon the mysterious failure of the Nobel committee to recognize the elder statesman of modem Latin American letters, Jorge Luis Borges: "I still don't un-derstand why they don't give it to him." It was not false modesty. Like other Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez owes much to the labyrinthine imagination of Borges, who died last summer. His luminous f...
sun and Mediterranean or Atlantic breezes. The reality is that since World War 11, the French, now 55 million strong, have built one of the Free World's top four industrial powers. Their belated move into the late 20th century has brought both blessings and problems; in parliamentary elec- tions this March, high unemployment (1 1 percent) and other ills may hurt President Francois Mitterrand's Socialists, who in 1981 formed France's first left-wing government in 23 years. Here, John Ardagh looks...
's mystique endures. When Americans travel there, as some half a million do each year, they have two nations in mind. One is the land where the word civilization was coined, where Descartes, Rousseau, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hugo, de Gaulle, and others still loom large. Then there is "the real France," a term suggesting an almost 19th- century world of swaying poplars, old chateaux, peasants, bistros, and beaches washed by sun and Mediterranean or Atlantic breezes. The reality is that since...
ing the recession-ridden summer of 1983, when Presi- dent Francois Mitterrand's two-year-old Socialist government was sagging in the opinion polls, the prestigious daily Le Monde took action. Its editors ran a series of front-page articles lamenting "the silence of the intellectuals."
Indeed, the lack of support for Mitterrand from Paris writers and thinkers was surprising. He not only had led the return to power of the Left, the historic home of the French intellectual, but, given his...
the ninth century, when the Catholic emperor Charles the Great held sway, "the French" were of Neolithic stock and that of Celtic, Roman, Frankish, Bur- gundian, and Norman arrivistes. Their initial success, dating from when the Gauls grew wheat and Cistercian monks burned forests to make fertilizer ash, lacked gloiw: They built Europe's first society of independent farmers, an achievement "as specific to France as the network of great trading cities was to Rome and the need for an...
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Americans are ambivalent about technology. They make folk heroes of the engineers who forge new technologies-Robert Fulton, Thomas Edison, and, most recently, Steven Wozniak, inventor of the Apple computer. Yet scholars and pundits chroni- cally worry that technology and its servants will overwhelm the human spirit. I11 1986, U.S. colleges and universities will graduate some 82,000 new engineers, trained to create space-age commu- nications, plan bridges and dams, or design computer chips....