Books, Arts & Manners: Prescription for Disaster

The War against Population: The Economics and Ideology of Population Control, by Jacqueline Kasun (Jameson Books, 350 pp., $16.95)

There is no doubt that optimism sells—even among conservatives, who traditionally have tended to see the world as “a dark and forbidding place where most new knowledge is false, most improvements are for the worse,” as George Will put it several years ago. Witness the popularity of the “damn the deficit” supply-siders and the success of George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty.

The War against Population: The Economics and Ideology of Population Control, by Jacqueline Kasun (Jameson Books, 350 pp., $16.95)

There is no doubt that optimism sells—even among conservatives, who traditionally have tended to see the world as “a dark and forbidding place where most new knowledge is false, most improvements are for the worse,” as George Will put it several years ago. Witness the popularity of the “damn the deficit” supply-siders and the success of George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty.