@CRPakaluk PhD Harvard (2010), AM Harvard (2002), BA UPenn (1998). Eight children by choice. Keep it going ladies, add your own. #postcardsforMacron
@obianuju@COLAfrica can we get this to catch on in Africa? let's flood Macron with beautiful postcards from educated women with large families born from their own loving choice.
People love to push back on the claim that you can't "really" have economic growth without population growth. I say it all the time--and the trolls come out.
What do we know about it? A thread. 🧵
First, economics proceeds from theory and observation (empirics). When it comes to observation, we don't have much to go on when we imagine the depopulation of the future. For all of history up to the mid 18th century, human populations struggled to grow at all. And people were fairly poor.
Then, both population growth and economic growth took off in the familiar hockey-stick shapes we've all seen. Population, here (from Our World in Data):
Leah, 5 kids, told me: "I think I always knew that I wanted to have children, but I never had a preconceived notion of, ‘I want to have x amount of kids.’ I just knew that I wanted to be a mom and I knew that I wanted to have a family. But I didn’t grow up with a lot of siblings and I didn’t have that experience and I didn’t grow up super religious.
Like I grew up in a reformed congregation which is basically completely secular except you do token Jewish things. And now, we’ve chosen a different life where we are much more intentionally practicing religion and the traditional." 2/N
She continued: "I was in a very intentional mindset when I got married. I was really dedicated to prayer and [Jewish] practice, and I was surrounded by like-minded people.
So, I lived in a community that was very conducive to that—a lot of other young people that were getting married and having families. And older people that were still having children and/or just there as support and mentors in my life. And [my son] was born 10 months after we got married basically." 3/N
“And, then, the kicker: ‘I had to take out a loan from my retirement in order to pay for our wedding.’
At which point, I found myself saying out loud: “Well, no. No, you didn’t.”
“You didn’t have to. It wasn’t obligatory. You could have gone to city hall in the morning and taken your friends and family out to a nice lunch afterward. (You know what they would have done? They would have thanked you. Most weddings are dreadful.) People do it all the time.”
I am going to start saying this once a week. We’re not a Christian country if kids are languishing in foster care in need of adoption. Fellow church-goers: we have to do better.
Let us resolve in 2020 to take home every child who needs a home. Anything less is a scandal.
If you need a home study get a home study. Talk to friends who have adopted. Cast into the deep!
Nothing in the official #Synod2018 documents seems to pass the sniff test. For instance, to communicate with youth, Synod says: "We propose a two-element solution. Firstly, a series of small messages, updates, perhaps at the end of each week from the Commission for Information."
Is the big-bureaucratic-state-mode--the "commission of information" loves you!--the "Synod" has something to say to you!--really the best they could come up with? Witness the instinctive modus operandi of current Church leadership.