Senior fellow Charles Kenny was mentioned in a New York Times opinion piece on global pessimism.
From the Article
Maybe it’s back-to-school fever, but everyone I know seems besieged by pessimism. I’m distressed by water shortages, the state of the labor movement and the Somalian famine, which may needlessly kill 700,000 people this year. Friends are overwhelmed by their memories of 9/11 and of the horribly blown opportunities to use an excruciatingly painful event to move us towards a better place.
Issues pile upon issues: the president’s failure to even initiate the change we thought we heard him promise. Ill parents and unemployed children. Irene, and the inevitable questions about climate change. The wipe-out of farms in the Northeast. All of this was bad enough, and then that chest-beating Djokovic won the U.S. Open.
I got my Everything-Is-Going-Wrong feeling. It was time for a call to Charles Kenny.
Kenny, a Brit who lives in the District of Columbia and has a sharp mind, a quick wit and the fancy title of senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, has come to my rescue before. Once, when I was trying to counter the ubiquitous but historically incorrect notion that population growth will make it impossible to feed everyone on the planet, I asked him his view, and he replied, “The bottom 650 million people, planet-wide, live on an income roughly 1/100th of the richest 650 million, which means that each one percent rise in the incomes of the richest has the same impact on consumption and resources as doubling the incomes of the poorest. So if you want to stop runaway exploitation of the earth’s resources through population control it makes the most sense to sterilize Americans and Europeans, because they’re the problem.”