It’s hard to account for the wide­spread influ­ence of this arti­cle, pub­lished in Sci­ence in 1968. It’s a poor­ly argued jum­ble of unques­tioned clichés and slip­shod rea­son­ing. Few, now, seem to be aware of the orig­i­nal intent of the arti­cle, which was to jus­tify coer­cive state con­trol of child­birth. With such spe­cious premis­es as “the moral­ity of an act is a func­tion of the state of the sys­tem at the time it is per­formed’ [p.1245 — he took it from Joseph Fletcher’s Sit­u­a­tion Ethics, then mis­ap­plied it], Hardin urged over­whelm­ing state pow­er to reg­u­late breed­ing, cit­ing the threat of “the fam­ily, the reli­gion, the race, or the class… that adopts over­breed­ing as a pol­icy to secure its own aggran­dize­ment”. This is just the old “yel­low per­il” and ter­ror of the low­er class­es of the Vic­to­rian age, dust­ed off and restat­ed in 1960’s pseu­do­sci­en­tific guise. Hardin assert­ed that the pres­ence of “the wel­fare state” and devel­oped economies would ensure an unstop­pable fecun­dity among such unde­sir­ables. Yet, in 1968, it was already evi­dent to all pro­fes­sional demog­ra­phers that that devel­oped economies with infra­struc­tures of social ser­vices invari­ably lev­eled off their birthrates (this is why Europe and Amer­ica now can­not replace their pop­u­la­tions with­out immi­gra­tion). Read more »

A few years ago, while stay­ing in Prague, my friend Fil­ip Marek hand­ed me a copy of Philip Pullman’s North­ern Lights (the orig­i­nal British title, which was changed to The Gold­en Com­pass in North Amer­ica). He asked if it was good enough to trans­late into Czech. I was delight­ed with it. It was fresh in its approach and imagery, ele­gantly writ­ten, and would fas­ci­nate both chil­dren and adults. How­ever, I fool­ishly put off read­ing the two oth­er books in the tril­ogy until see­ing the recent film remind­ed me to. Read more »