Hillsboro, Tenn.: Shot June 16, 2009
The normally sensible Mary Elizabeth Williams, of Salon, posted today an emphatic apologetic for the most fertile family in America, the Duggars. It caught me off-guard, because I thought it was fairly common opinion that their relentless drive to reproduce isn't exactly a terrific plan. Like the Duggars, I’m from northwest Arkansas, where we were reading about this sprawling family long before the rest of the country pressed against the glass to gawk at their reproductive prowess. When my mother sent word yesterday that they’re now expecting their t … w … e … n … t … i … e … t … h child, I wrote her back in a bit of a flurry:

Imagine if each of those kids went and took the same attitude toward reproduction as their parents:

One generation: 20 kids.
Second generation: 20 parents x 20 kids each = 400 grandkids
Third generation: 400 parents x 20 kids each = 8,000 great-grandkids
Fourth generation: 8,000 parents x 20 kids each = 160,000 great-great-grandkids
Fifth generation: 160,000 parents x 20 kids each = 3.2 million great-great-great grandkids (greater than the population of Arkansas)

Now, this assumes that in each of these generations, they continue to find people outside their family to marry. (Obviously when you have 160,000 distant cousins running around, some of these might cancel one another out.) Still, at this rate this family line alone would, assuming a 20-year generation, create a living family that surpasses the current population of China, Canada and California combined by the year 2130.

Aw, letters home to Ma! As admittedly cludgy as these calculations are, they're my attempt to wrap my head around such profligate babymaking. Williams skips that consequence of 20-child families in her piece, “Stop Judging the Duggars,” which carried the infinitely charitable deck, “So what if they're expecting again? A family of 20 is just another side of reproductive choice.” Williams is justified in defending the family against some of the nastiest of the Internet slimers who make cracks about Mrs. Duggar’s anatomy and about the family generally. The Duggars are people, after all — a lot of people, at that — and while the parents are clearly not interested in availing themselves of the advances in modern contraception that have been made over the past 10,000 years, their kids still deserve to be able to Google themselves.

But as we pass 7 billion people on this increasingly hot, increasingly crowded blue marble of ours, this quibble about multiplying the species isn’t academic. It’s one of the great tasks facing humanity: Where in the hell is everyone going to live, and what are they going to eat? What pressures will those demands put on ecosystems, on farmland, on water supplies? What weaker nations will succumb to poverty and war as stronger nations take those essentials by force? Williams would probably not be so amenable to a family famous for driving a singularly spectacular monster truck that got one mile to the gallon. So why’s she feeling so charitable toward a family intent on putting 20 (or 400 or 8,000) more cars and trucks on the roads?

To put it as lightly as possible: We owe the continued existence of human civilization as we know it to the fact that the Duggars do not represent the mainstream of family planning. It's very healthy to acknowledge this fact. You just don't have to act the thorough jackass in doing so.

For a consideration more sober than the Duggars’ on how parents will determine the fate of the frickin’ world, please read Bill McKibben’s essay “The Case for Single-child Families,” about his decision, rooted in considerations of faith and geography alike, to get a vasectomy after his first child. We'll close here with an excerpt:

The beginning of Genesis contains the fateful command, repeated elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth." That this was the first commandment gave it special priority. And it was biological, too, a command that echoed what our genes already shouted.

But there is something else unique about it—it is the first commandment we have fulfilled. There’s barely a habitable spot on the planet without a human being; in our lifetimes we’ve filled every inch of the planet with our presence. Everywhere the temperature climbs, the ultraviolet penetrates more deeply. … There’s not a creature anywhere on earth whose blood doesn’t show the presence of our chemicals, not an ocean that isn’t higher because of us. For better and for worse, we are everywhere. We can check this commandment off the list.

And we can check it off for happier reasons as well. There’s no denying that we’ve done great environmental damage, but it’s also true that we’ve spread wondrous and diverse cultures, full of love and song, across the wide earth. We should add a holiday to the calendar of every church to celebrate this achievement.

But when you check something off a list, you don’t just throw the list away. You look further down the list, see what comes next. And the list, of course, is long. The Gospels, the Torah, the Koran and a thousand other texts sacred and profane give us plenty of other goals toward which to divert some of the energy we’ve traditionally used in raising large families, goals on which we’ve barely begun. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the oppressed; love your neighbor as yourself; heal the earth. We live on a planet where 3 billion people don’t have clean water, where species die by the score each day, where kids grow up without fathers, where violence overwhelms us, where people judge each other by the color of their skin, where a hypersexualized culture poisons the adolescence of girls, where old people and young people need each other’s support. And the energy freed by having smaller families may be some of the energy needed to take on these next challenges. To really take them on, not just to announce that they’re important, or to send a check, or to read an article, but to make them central to our lives.

Manchester, Tennessee: Shot June 14, 2009
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I know it’s just one cryptic article, but there were enough hints dropped in this Associated Press interview with the chairman of the Nobel Peace prize committee that I believe it could just wind up being one of my intellectual heroes, the nonviolence theoretician, historian and back-seat activist, Gene Sharp.

Here’s what the AP reported:

STRASBOURG, France (AP) -- This year's Nobel Peace prize winner is "obvious," the chairman of the prize committee says, and he's surprised that "commentators and experts" haven't picked up on it.

With upheaval in the Arab world and Europe's spiraling debt crisis among the top issues in a turbulent year, Thorbjoern Jagland didn't name the much-anticipated winner who will be announced Friday in Oslo.

But in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press, Jagland did give a few clues into the thinking of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that awards the prize.

The deadline for nominations was Feb. 1, and committee members could add their own suggestions until Feb. 28. Jagland said it was "not necessarily" too late for consideration of leaders of the Arab Spring revolutions, which toppled Tunisia's longtime autocrat in January and then spread from there.

"We saw many of the (Arab Spring) actors at the time, but that doesn't mean that the prize goes in that direction, because there are many other positive developments in the world," he said.

"The most positive development will get the prize," Jagland said. "So I'm a little bit surprised that it has not been already seen by many commentators and experts and all this because for me it's obvious."

Who the hell knows what “obvious” means. If you look at this odds chart (bless the British, that nation of degenerates) it would seem that “obvious” is Burmese opposition politician and activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who already won a Nobel in 1991. Second on the list is Sima Samar, a human rights advocate in Afghanistan. Sharp is somewhat further down the list.

From my admittedly narrow perspective, Sharp makes an ideal candidate. He refined his analysis of past nonviolent struggles into slender volumes that operate as handbooks for revolt: “From Dictatorship to Democracy” is the gold standard; the subtitle on his 2009 book is “A Guide for Strategic Planning for Action to End a Dictatorship or Other Oppression.” Translated versions of these guides have been shown to influence just about every successful nonviolent and popular uprising of the past quarter-century, at least. For a primer on Sharp, check out this Wall Street Journal profile of him from 2008 and this New York Times piece from earlier this year, when it became clear that the Arab Spring, like the Colour Revolutions before it, were following tactics and patterns described and prescribed by Sharp. A documentary on his work and the ripples it has had on this extraordinary 2011 is just out: “How to Start a Revolution,” by Ruaridh Arrow, posits that Sharp’s recipe for nonviolent revolution is now the dominant approach in overturning dictators today.

Sharp is famous for having distilled the history of nonviolence into a list of 198 discrete varieties of action (although when I met with him last year, he deflected some credit for that catalog by pointing out it’s almost certainly incomplete, now almost 40 years after its creation). That he’s an American is a relief to anyone concerned that America’s projection of power worldwide is primarily via predator drones and SEAL teams. Truly his philosophy is one America was founded upon: that all political power rests ultimately with the consent of the governed, and that dictators, of any size or stripe, can only achieve what their minions carry out. The greatest force for peace in the world may then be sheer disobedience, and in Sharp, resistance has not only its muse but its architect. I wish him luck this Friday, betting odds be damned.

Cypress Mountain: shot March 27, 2011The signs posted at the border when you drive into British Columbia dub this province "The Best Place on Earth." It's the cockiest slogan anywhere outside of South Dakota calling itself "The Sunshine State." But on certain days, when a couple of bridges, a winding mountain pass and a few ski lifts are all that separate the heart of Vancouver from this ridiculous view, the boast seems modest, for it does confine its scope to a single planet.

Tupelo, Mississippi.: Shot May 30, 2010

Evan Bayh, the recently retired Indiana Senator, has taken a thumping this week from the likes of the WaPo’s Ezra Klein and Salon’s Alex Pareene for his life after Congress: not as a professor or philanthropist, as he'd predicted, but as a lobbyist and Fox News cast member.

The latter is a depressingly suitable job for a man who has proven, at least on one occasion, to grease up the truth a bit before rolling it out on cable. Far as I know, nobody called out Bayh for a fact he mangled during an appearance on MSNBC last year, but it’s never too late to start.

On Sept. 13, Bayh went on MSNBC to argue against the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, saying that we need to focus on growth. As evidence for this view, he stated that the top 2 percent of earners, who would stand to pay more if the tax rates revert, "account for 30 percent of consumption." (1:15 mark on)

I sputtered when I saw it, yet the hosts said nothing. The big tell in this isn’t the lunatic ratio of earning to share of the economy, exactly; it’s that Bayh conflates income with consumption. The top 2 percent might earn 30 percent of the nation's income but the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that people who earn that much tend to spend far less of their annual income than poorer people do (on the order of half).

I called Bayh's office in the fall to ask whether he had a source for his could provide a source. A press officer there took my digits, but I never heard back from him. I suspect it’s because there is no accurate source for those numbers. If anyone does knows otherwise, HMU.

Here's why I think he's off, and substantially. A Wall Street Journal story last summer quoted another Democrat arguing for extending the tax cuts:

"I think given the fragility of the recovery, the timing is wrong for any kind of tax increase of this nature," Rep. Gerry Connolly (D., Va.) said. "I know that puts me out of step with many in my own caucus, but it's important for members to remember the top 5% [of earners] generates 30% of consumer spending."

That the top 5 percent (not 2) generates 30 percent of consumer spending seems more in line with reality (see fig. 2 in this 2006 paper). But I don't believe people in those brackets don't actually consume anywhere near their income levels relative to lower earners. Compare the lines "income after taxes" and, a bit further down, "average annual expenditures" on these two .pdf charts from 2008: normal-people income vs. made-good-choices-and-caught-some-breaks income.

It's evident, looking at those figures, that people in the lower brackets are spending nearly everything they take in. Intuitively, too, that makes sense: A family making $30,000 and a family making $300,000 pay the same amount for a gallon of gas, for a 12-pack of Bud, for a hot shower, for a movie ticket, for a large Domino's pizza. Accordingly, people making more than $150k a year are only spending about half of what they have left after taxes. (This is, of course, why they are rich. They spend less than they earn.) Bayh’s argument is specious on several levels. Tops is the implication that high earners are proportionately high consumers, when in fact the rich manage to sack away well more than the rest of us.

Bayh's line was brief, and perhaps innocuous, but the fact that he's conflating consumption (in the name of economic activity) and income does not seem, to me, accidental: He's rounding greatly in his favor, to the point that he virtually writes the counterargument to his point. A 2 percent that can afford to chug one-third of the economy would seem to be in fine position to also chip in for these these enormous loans the U.S. is taking out to help run this semi-functional modern economy of ours.