KQED

It is acknowledged now that the last century was perhaps the worst in humanity's history: 200M people killed, slaughtered, genocided. Ecological disasters and rapid species extinctions are the "iceing on the cake". It is not farfatched to point to the four fold population explosion as the root cause of these calamities.

Remarkable as well is the average intelligence trend in the society. Consider the following effects:
- children inherit on average (with a 0.6 correlation coefficient) the intelligence of their parents
- the bottom half of the society procreates more and faster than the top half
- intelligence correlates positively with social status
Hence the unpleasant and sad conclusion that in spite of massive outlays in public education, the intelligence of the average citizen has been going down during the last century.

The resulting worsening income distribution requires more transfers through taxations (while the tax system contains subsidies for having children, which are being used most by the bottom half of the society). The solidarity principle yields unintended side effects.

Most if not all the programs on KQED's Forum deal with some spinoff of the unfolding problems of the continuing population expansions and/or debilization of the citizenry. Seldom if ever are these insidious phenomena brought in the discussion as the underlying mechanism for the "cause du jour" and neither are they brought up as independent topics.

The press, politicians, UN, IMF, World Bank, religious leaders etc. do not want to touch these topics and thus the juggernaut keeps on rolling and destroys everything on its path.