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[travel] Nazi eugenics
Jun. 17th, 2009 11:03 pmIn the Jewish Museum in Berlin, there was an exhibit on loan from the Washington DC Holocaust museum on eugenics. It was interesting to see how the Nazis took something extreme and justified it to a somewhat skeptical public. They basically mixed some reasonable (though still controversial) arguments in with increasingly extreme conclusions from those arguments.
For example, they produced graphs of demographic shifts showing how, by 1960, there would be a crushingly huge weight of old and infirm people to support. This was argued to mean that people (especially fit, productive ones) need to have more offspring to prrevent social collapse. Amusingly, the 1960 disaster scenario looks a lot like what developed countries have today, demographics-wise, whereas their 1900 historical scenario looks like a modern third-world country. Apparently that disaster didn't come to pass, though modern demographers are currently debating whether further demographic shifts toward an older population will bring down the social security system.
( More observations from the exhibit )
For example, they produced graphs of demographic shifts showing how, by 1960, there would be a crushingly huge weight of old and infirm people to support. This was argued to mean that people (especially fit, productive ones) need to have more offspring to prrevent social collapse. Amusingly, the 1960 disaster scenario looks a lot like what developed countries have today, demographics-wise, whereas their 1900 historical scenario looks like a modern third-world country. Apparently that disaster didn't come to pass, though modern demographers are currently debating whether further demographic shifts toward an older population will bring down the social security system.
( More observations from the exhibit )
