On the "to be read" list

March 23, 2008

On the "to be read" list

Murat Iyigun says he cannot wait to get his hands on Joel Mokyr's forthcoming book, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain.

Nicholas D. Kristof writes about Matthew Connelly's Fatal Misconception, making it sound like a cross between Liberal Fascism and The White Man's Burden.

I only found one other review of Connelly, by Reihan Salam, who raises some cautionary notes. But I was sold by the book's preface.

This book is about the most ambitious population control schemes of all, which aimed to remake humanity by controlling the population of the world, typically by reducing the fertility of poor people and poor countries. But all population control projects shared the premise that societies should consciously reproduce themselves by design, even if that meant controlling how people disposed of their own bodies. And all looked at human beings not as individuals but as populations that could be shaped through the combined force of faith and science. That is why nativism, eugenics, pronatalism, and coercive or manipulative forms of “family planning“ share a common history, one that can help us understand how they developed, how they diverged, and how the cause of reproductive rights was finally redeemed.