¶ Artifacts
Index Entry
What I find as the big pattern is that human beings continue to make babies where they’re not going to be successful. Look what happened when waterworks came in. Long before the first census in 1810-- go back to 1600 and look in the family bibles and you will find the average of Early American and Colonial families are between 10 and 13 children per family with many of them dying at the time of childbirth. It was very sad. But as in came waterworks, or any kind of an artifact, that changed the probabilities and down went the number of babies per family and up went the life expectancy. These two are in absolute balance. In country after country, as the kilowatts-per-capita consumption goes up, down goes the birthrate. The two are absolutely irreversible.
