Fatuous Jonathan Franzen

On a video clip, the author says he wants to talk, through one of the characters in his novel Freedom, about "the elephant in the room" -- overpopulation. See, people naturally want to procreate, but overpopulation is either the cause or an aggravating factor of all of our problems. Someone should point out to him that the most jam-packed place on Earth, Singapore, is also just about the richest. Poverty is caused by many things, but the Malthusian view that overpopulation is at its root has not been seriously believed for decades. A writer who declares he wants to address "the elephant in the room" is pompous enough, but when the elephant is a dusty, stuffed relic, he makes himself ludicrous.