I just finished Fewer by Ben Wattenberg.

[OrwellwasRight]

I read it for a real life book club, and I thought it was just a front to use falling fertility rates to push the neo-con agenda. Anyone else read it?

Technically, I thought the writing was too informal (lots of contractions, use of "I," misplaced commas, and only about 2 footnotes in the whole book), and he shot down straw men, and indicted the entire environmental view by criticizing a couple of topics and completely ignoring the rest of it.

Substantively, I found it to be a propoganda piece, not a reasoned analysis of population trends. He used declining fertility to argue that Bush is a visionary because he sees that we must export democracy (while continually noting that it cannot be "imposed"). He also only ever relies on science from the American Enterprise Institute (which not coincidentally funds his work as well).

Anyway, the whole book made me angry.

The blurb about him at the end of the book say he used to wrok for LBJ and Hubert Humphrey. Does anybody know what happened to this guy or was he always a neocon infiltrating the left?

[ooglymoogly]

1. ben wattenburg doesn't get it and he never got it.

he lives in a fantasy world.

[OrwellwasRight]

2. And so self-important and arrogant.

He kept saying how he say the trend ten years before the UN even he's not a demographer himself.

He also kept mentioning his other books.

Ick. I wonder what the book group is going to be like? I will have to leave if people start saying it was a brilliant book.