4 February 2010 / ERGUN BABAHAN STAR,
When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suggested publicly that families in Turkey should try to have at least three children apiece, people from the urban middle class in particular ridiculed his words.
After all, most city-dwellers from the middle class these days have just two children, or even just one. Right now, on the table in front of me, is a copy of the latest edition of the Foreign Affairs journal. The cover page is about the “New Population Bomb,” written by Jack A. Goldstone, the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. professor of public policy at George Mason University. The synopsis of the article is that “you are only as rich and powerful as your population is.” It lists examples from history to illustrate the argument. We, according to the research done for this article, would do best for our future as a nation to listen to Prime Minister Erdoğan’s advice. But on one condition: that we educate those children beyond the level of simple literacy skills and that we prevent them from having to sell tissues on street corners.
