There is an article at Science that asks an interesting if stomach-churning question: were the Chinese authorities right in implementing the “One Child Policy” 40 years ago? What’s the dividing line separating demographics, the study of populations, from politics and morality?
Read the whole thing.
There are many, many courses of inquiry that have become taboo (and more that probably should be) because they are so prone to be misused. Is demographics one of them? What are the limits of legitimate demographic inquiry?
I’m baffled by the uproar, and think its very unscientific to estimate the quantitative impacts for a policy only if meets some political agenda.
There have been recent articles about academics in the medieval studies field that worry about how the history of that period is or may be utilized by white supremacists and what to do about it. I think they should do nothing about it, the mere discussion and call to activism suggests that their product will be increasingly poor because it will go through the sieve of having a conversation with someone who is not going to be reading it anyway,
What’s particularly baffling is that the uproar comes across as conceding the point to the Chinese government. The policy set out to control population, and opponents are trying to prevent anyone from arguing that the policy actually controlled population.
While certainly policies can fail, and civil liberty concerns can appear more heinous if it was in pursuit of a failed policy, but what this line of argument does is undercut the severity of the population controls, it strongly suggest things like forced abortions and other abuses were not commonplace and Chinese policy was mainly words without any real enforcement. This is not the ground to be fighting on is it?
Now that I think about it, this is an argument in the population estimates of the number of Indians in the Americas before Columbus. Estimates went from way too few at one time, to probably way too much these days because the politic framework that research takes place in.
Indeed, science is supposed to be about the systemic, orderly search for knowledge. However human frailties exist and get magnified by peer pressure, etc in academe.
Some should forms of research be banned? Regulated to keep mistakes in the lab and harmful only to the researchers for sure. Otherwise, the limit should be funding.
There are all sorts of ways to ban research. One way is outright legal prohibition but that’s a very small minority of cases.
Other ways include making it impossible to get certain thesis topics approved, get articles on certain topics published, get tenure when your research is in certain areas, not being able to get funding for your research, and so on.
We might try making a list of taboo subjects. Racial differences. Gender differences (unless they demonstrate that women are superior). PD mentioned pre-Columbian population estimates in the Americas.
Taboo subjects, fetal responsiveness to external stimuli, humane methods of execution, futile care (when to say enough in medicine), life expectancy comparisons for American slaves vs West African natives, post nuclear war survival, a relook at Moyihans’ essay, in utero cures for congenital deafness, zero emission IC engines, hand guns/suicide/homicide, medical uses for psychedelics is a top of the head list.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/ptsd-drug-treatment/
There is research going on with psychedelics. People are also using Ketamine to treat depression.
Steve
Short answer because I don’t have enough time to explain the reasoning.
Demography is a legitimate field of study even if the results are uncomfortable.
But this study was truly flawed and the author failed the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence standard.
And the answer to whether the one child policy was right is “Hell no!!â€
I’d like to see a study regarding whether normal men feel the urge to commit rape, or child sexual abuse, but resist it, or if such urges are only present in a minority of men, who almost never resist, at least for long, and become offenders. How would you answer the
questionnaire? How would secret offenders? How would you know?
This is important because it goes to the question of free will, guilt, and innocence. Is the study taboo, or just impossible?
I cannot answer for all men only for myself. I have never felt the urge to commit rape or child sexual abuse. Maybe I’m abnormal. Maybe I have an abnormally disciplined mind. I have no way of knowing.