This came across my Blue Sky feed this morning…

This idea that raising the standard of living drives the birth rate down is something Bill Gates has been saying and when I first read him arguing it I was surprised at how much sense it made. Some ideas just get into your head at a young age, and then you realize later in life it was just about rich and powerful men pushing you in a particular direction. Let’s not be trying to raise the standard of living for the poor because we need them to keep the middle class scared.

I’m pretty sure that’s Steven Pinker of the Blank Slate being talked about in that quote. The Blank Slate was my first exposure to him. In it he argued against a model of human consciousness that denies that our evolutionary heritage has any influence on our behavior. I was already thinking that model was wrong after reading Robert Ardrey’s book African Genesis which argued that if we sought a deeper understanding of ourselves in times of need then we should to explore those animal horizons “from which we have made our quick little march.” This was during the Cold War, so you can appreciate what those times of need were.

And on that basis I picked up Pinker’s first book expecting to read some elaboration of what Ardrey said. But he lost me when he began approvingly quoting Thomas Sowell, who called homosexuality a deathstyle (hello Dick Hafer) and incongruously argued that allowing gay men to marry would help the spread of AIDS. Yes, let’s not be encouraging gay men to get married and settle down. Sowell, who fancies himself as a recovered Marxist, also liked to bellyache about how American Marxists haven’t actually read Marx…oh yes they do, ad infinitum, and their arguing with each other about what Marxism is, let alone with what Marx’s critics say he is, reminds me of arguments over the Bible I had to listen to. How many Hegels can stand on the head of a dialectic…

So I wasn’t terribly surprised that Pinker spent some time on Epstein’s island, only to get his self important ass self booted off after telling his host he was wrong about something. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day (or once if it’s a military clock). If you want to slow down the birthrate, improve everyone’s standard of living.

And…yeah…Trump and Epstein seem to have had lots in common. Fragile egos of a feather sexually prey on teenagers together. Why were you even there Steven Pinker??