Overpopulation, Eugenics, and Reproductive Rights

It is widely assumed that people have a right of reproduction.  This right is often believed to include the right to have as many children as one wishes.  It is typically construed as a matter of personal choice, including the right to use birth control, for both sexes, as well as the woman’s right to choose to abort a fetus.  As such, it is juxtaposed most sharply against the official Roman Catholic Church viewpoint, in which one is obliged to have children, insofar as interference with conception is considered sinful.

Having Children, on the Individual Level

The assumed right to have children is commonly extended to a right to decide what sorts of children one will have.  This assumed right of perceived reproductive quality is commonly considered to include such measures as choosing high-quality sperm donors, choosing the sex of one’s child, using fertility treatments and other assisted reproductive technologies, and deselecting fetuses with congenital disabilities.  These sorts of “designer eugenic” measures, taken without coercion or financial incentives, have also been called “backdoor eugenics” and “laissez-faire eugenics” (Rothstein, Cai, & Marchant, 2009, p. 59).  The assumed right of perceived reproductive quality has been extended controversially, as in the McCullough-Duchesneau decision to deliberately create a child with a disability that the parents do not consider a disability.  Through genetic engineering, the assumed right of perceived reproductive quality is poised to give parents vastly greater and more precise control over the characteristics of their children. In one form or another, voluntary eugenic measures seem to be broadly embraced as means of giving future generations genes that will make their lives better and/or preventing them from getting genes that will make their lives worse (Rothstein et al., p. 61).

Like most rights, the assumed right to have children is at least sometimes construed as entailing certain responsibilities.  For instance, the case of Nadya Suleman, more notoriously known as “Octomom” because of her decision to seek and give birth to octuplets, has generated criticism arising from the medical risks and cost of their delivery and her financial inability to raise them without government aid.  The case has also led to condemnation of the doctor by California’s state medical board on several grounds, including “allegedly failing to refer Ms. Suleman for a mental health evaluation” (El-Rahman, 2010).

Dillard (2009, p. 373) poses the matter in terms of “the procreative rights of criminally unfit parents.”  Criminal unfitness, in Dillard’s analysis, means bringing children into this world in “situations where the law forbids them to be,” as where a court orders a crack cocaine addict not to become pregnant.  Short of criminality, Dillard (p. 380) suggests that a prospective parent must meet a test of fitness, understood as “the minimum (that is, the necessary, but not sufficient) moral and legal competency required for parents to maintain custody of their child.”  This test, he says, is “most likely the legal standard required for a state to terminate parental rights.”  Hence, “We can view a temporary no-procreation order as equivalent to a court temporarily depriving unfit prospective parents of the custody of their prospective children.”  For instance, such an order could be appropriate, Dillard says, when the parent has been repeatedly found unfit for previously born children and shows no sign of having changed (pp. 381-382).  Lawmakers have also become involved in preventing harm to future children in cases involving incest, unsafe pharmaceuticals and medical devices, surrogacy contracts, trusts (as where e.g., a guardian ad litem is appointed to represent the interests of the unborn), prisoner procreation, statutory rape, parental abuse, and failure to pay child support (pp. 390-396).

References to parental fitness, like references to (especially negative) eugenics, can be disturbing to those who have studied, observed, or experienced third parties’ abuses of the power to control choices related to reproduction.  This power has been exercised in such areas as racial purity laws in the United States and in Nazi Germany (Scales-Trent, 2001), forced sterilization of undesirables in the United States (Rothstein et al., 2009, p. 59), restrictions on adoption by gay or lesbian couples, and restrictions on marriage of people with mental disabilities (Matloff, 2009).  As Dillard's (2009) examples suggest, however, the fact that such restrictions can be taken to extremes does not justify elimination of all restrictions on the assumed right to have children.


Having Children, on the Global Level

The foregoing remarks have addressed the situations of individuals who may be unfit parents, or who are procreating beyond their ability to provide.  There is, however, an entirely different concern that also has potential impact on the assumed right of reproduction.  This concern has to do with population growth; it is oriented, not toward individual procreators, but rather toward humanity as a whole.  As such, it sidesteps questions of whether gay people, people with disabilities, or other special targets of attention should be governed by special rules in their decisions to procreate, adopt, and so forth.  It asks, instead, how continued population growth might impose upon everyone’s decisions.

Along those lines, in a different article, Dillard (2007, pp. 44-45) contends that, in the U.S. and elsewhere, the law does not provide a limitless right to have as many children as one might wish, but rather, “Properly stated, the right [of reproduction] authorizes individuals to engage in a range of behavior between a guaranteed act of procreation or replacement, and procreation for optimized replacement, and nothing more,” where “optimized replacement” means the possibility of adjusting the rate of procreation upwards or downwards to achieve an optimal population level, rather than rigidly maintaining population at its current level regardless of whether that level is optimal.  Citing Roe v. Wade, Dillard (pp. 50-51) suggests that “Not procreating is personal,” in the sense that abortion is ultimately up to the mother, but “procreating is interpersonal” because it involves not only the mother but also the interests “of the children that will be born, those of other persons in society whose lives those children will influence, and more impersonal or collective interests.”  Privacy, he says, is “the opposite and absence of others’ rights”:  “As more persons are added, their spheres of privacy contract” (p. 56).  Population expansion requires ever-expanding rules to protect ever-increasing numbers of people from one another.  It reduces the choices that will be available to people in the future; it restricts the rights of others to natural resources (pp. 58-60).

A series of books in the 1960s and 1970s drew enormous attention to the problem of environmental degradation.  Aligica (2009, p. 74) identifies those as including Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring (1962), Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968), The Limits to Growth (1972) by Meadows, Meadows, Randers, and Behrens, and Global 2000 Report to the President (1980) by the Council on Environmental Quality and the U.S. Department of State.  Opposing this, Kahn and Simon’s Resourceful Earth (1984) offered a point-by-point rebuttal.  Aligica poses the contrast between Global 2000 (p. 1) and The Resourceful Earth (p. 2) in these excerpts:

If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world’s people will be poorer in many ways than they are today. For hundreds of millions of the desperately poor, the outlook for food and other necessities of life will be no better. For many it will be worse. Barring revolutionary advances in technology, life for most people on earth will be more precarious in 2000 than it is now – unless the nations of the world act decisively to alter current trends.

versus

If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be less crowded (though more populated), less polluted, more stable ecologically, and less vulnerable to resource-supply disruption than the world we live in now. Stresses involving population, resources, and environment will be less in the future than now… The world’s people will be richer in most ways than they are today… The outlook for food and other necessities of life will be better … life for most people on earth will be less precarious economically than it is now.

Whatever doubts may have existed in 2000, it now increasingly appears that what Aligica calls the Neo-Malthusians had it right.  Malthus (1798) observed that food supplies rise arithmetically at best, while population rises geometrically -- that, in other words, population would always expand to keep ahead of food supplies.  The postwar Green Revolution -- achieving critical momentum in the 1950s and 1960s -- now seems only to have postponed the point at which population, now growing very rapidly, would outstrip food supplies (Turner, 2009; United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2009).  (Howe and Devereux (2004) have developed a six-step scale, from food security to extreme famine, to characterize food scarcity problems in specific locations.)

The problems posed by overpopulation are numerous and huge.  The oceans are increasingly devastated, to the point of no longer being able to recover.  Developing nations are experiencing millions of deaths each year due to pollution and contamination of food and water (Pimentel et al., 2007).  The planet is heating up and may become uninhabitably hot.  Kates (2005) identifies “a Malthusian catastrophe already unfolding in poor countries,” potentially occurring in developed countries as well, and “a serious risk of wholesale environmental collapse” as problems requiring urgent attention.

In general, Brander (2007), a business professor, feels that the Neo-Malthusian 100-year projection in Limits to Growth have not been very accurate so far, but nonetheless acknowledges serious concerns about overpopulation and environmental degradation – concerns, he said, that have been downplayed in recent years because of intellectuals' faith in technological progress.  Brander judges that, at present, it could go either way:  humanity in the 21st century can rise to the challenge, or it can overpopulate itself to oblivion.  Either way, though, he concludes that Malthus did correctly identify the basic problem.

Population problems are going to be especially pressing in developing nations.  Goldstone (2010) identifies several problematic prospects for those nations.  Notably, they will account for the large bulk of the population increase; the growth in population will be especially concentrated in relatively unstable (poor, young, and heavily Muslim) countries; and most of the world’s population will become urbanized.

This should not be taken to imply that the U.S. is safe from population-related concerns.  Many saw the projected population of 300 million, which is now the reality, as cause for deep concern back in the 1960s, when the population was around 200 million (e.g., Hoff, 2010, pp. 30, 39-40).  Projections generally seem to expect the U.S. population to grow at least until 2050, reaching the range of 400-450 million (e.g., Orgman & Guarneri, 2009).  Kolankiewicz (2010) contends that the U.S. has far exceeded its ecological carrying capacity.  Similarly, Kates (2005) lists a number of concerns (including deforestation, mass extinction, and water shortage) as grounds for endorsing a global population reduction to 2 billion and an American reduction to 200 million, with each nation “making its own trade-off between consumption and population size” (p. 267).  Powledge (2010, p. 265) states that food insecurity will be a global concern for the next 50 years and beyond.  This prospect appears likely to be especially problematic for lower-income households, given the expectation of substantial food price increases in coming decades (Hubert et al., 2010, p. S-2; see Ivanic & Martin, 2010).

Aside from the question of how people will be able to afford their food, there is also considerable evidence that, with some exceptions in certain subpopulations (e.g., young adults) and certain places (e.g., Manhattan), Americans generally prefer to live in circumstances of relatively low population density.  Numerous studies corroborate this.  For example, while Williams (2009, p. S84) notes that people view population density as both positive and negative, depending upon a variety of cultural and personal preferences for neighbors and social interactions, perceptions of safety, health supports, and other considerations (see also Hur, Nasar, & Chun, 2010, p. 57), he also observes (p. S90) that most people in the UK prefer, or aspire to, lower-density living.  Hur et al. (pp. 53, 57) found, similarly, a preference for openness (i.e., “vistas with open views and the lack of spatial enclosure”) in a study of homeowners in Franklin County, Ohio.  Helliwell and Barrington-Leigh (2010, p. 11) likewise found a strong positive link between subjective well-being and low population density in British Columbia and in the Atlantic provinces of Canada.  Across the U.S. as a whole, McGranahan (2008, p. 237) found, in a study of migration patterns and topographical features, that

[E]lements of preferred landscapes described by Ulrich (1986) – a mix of open land and forest, water, and topographic variation – have a strong bearing on recent migration in the rural areas of the U.S.  Migration is an important behavioral indicator of substantial preferences – people “vote with their feet” (Tiebout, 1956), often at considerable economic cost and at the expense of social ties.

Berry and Okulicz-Kozaryn (2009) find life dissatisfaction higher in big cities in Anglo-Saxon countries but lower in big cities in Asia.  Even so, among several large Asian cities, Lai (2009, p. 731) finds that Hong Kong, with its high population density, crime, and other urban difficulties, yields high levels of worry, stress, and depression for its older population.

Conclusion

Surely there should be places like San Francisco.  Surely people should be encouraged to enjoy them and make the most of them.  But on the whole, as the famous poem says, good fences make good neighbors.  Overall, steadily increasing population is not conducive to lifestyles that are more enjoyable or affordable.  There is substantial evidence that the people of the world (including the United States) have seriously exceeded the human capacity to use the Earth in a sustainable way – that is, without exhausting the availability of clean air and water, and with enough capacity to survive drought and hard times safely.  Having children in the present increases the likelihood that people in the future, potentially including one's own descendants, will experience lives that are short and/or nasty by today's standards.

Under such circumstances, it is neither moral nor reasonable to continue (intentionally or negligently) to add to the human population.  The point at which it will once again be moral and reasonable to do so depends upon how soon and how effectively humanity can get its numbers and its demands back in balance with its resources.  The question of choosing the characteristics of one's child is moot.  The assumption that everyone has a right to reproduce him/herself will be morally and logically untenable for at least the next ten years, and possibly for the next half-century or longer.  What's done is done, as far as the past is concerned; but future decisions need to be made with much greater awareness of people other than oneself.

This is very good news for a number of constituencies, including particularly the children who have been treated like cattle, to be herded into schools that will process them, but who cannot safely wander alone in their own neighborhoods for fear they will be lost to vicious predators.  When the ratio of adults to children increases, and especially if the number of unemployed adults increases, neighborhoods may once again become places where there is always someone around to keep an eye out, to make sure the kids are OK.  It is also good news for the cattle themselves, who at some point may be returned from industrial farms to actual pastures of their own.  And it is good news for people with disabilities, old people, and others who need viable neighborhoods in order to survive and thrive.  When every middle-aged adult can excuse him/herself from civic involvement with the rationale that s/he has to worry about his/her own family first, there aren't many people left to care about the community as a whole.

Much can change for the better, if people can be weaned from the idea that they are not real men and women until they have reproduced themselves.  This is an idea that can become as antiquated as the notion that you aren't a real man until you have gone skydiving or pulled some crazy stunt, or that you aren't a real woman until you have joined the official job market and have dedicated yourself to a corporation somewhere.

There will always be a need for reproduction of the species; but it can be done differently, and it can be done better.  The time has arrived to learn more about that.

A Brief Anti-Climatic Prognostication

I see where predictions have sped up, for the arrival of the summer when the North Pole is entirely ice-free. They were saying this would happen in 2030; now they are thinking it could be by 2013. I have seen that kind of acceleration in other sorts of predictions in recent years. If I recall correctly, they were predicting that world population would level off at a total number that was much lower than they are now predicting. In the stock market situation of the past year, the extreme pessimists eventually became the moderates, as things became worse than most economists had expected. Today, I see where Paul Krugman says this:

Martin Weitzman, a Harvard economist who has been driving much of the recent high-level debate, offers some sobering numbers. Surveying a wide range of climate models, he argues that, over all, they suggest about a 5 percent chance that world temperatures will eventually rise by more than 10 degrees Celsius (that is, world temperatures will rise by 18 degrees Fahrenheit). As Mr. Weitzman points out, that’s enough to “effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it.”

In light of the slow and scant progress being made on environmental matters across the globe as a whole (factoring in the levels of pollution in China and other developing nations), it seems reasonable to speculate that Weitzman's calculations may have been based upon models that were compatible with the earlier "ice-free by '30" estimate. The recent change to an "ice-free by '13" estimate would presumably speed up the timetables in the studies Weitzman would survey, if he were to start his research over today, or a year from now. That is, we may speculate that a 5% chance of a temperature rise exceeding 18 degrees is now more like 10% or higher. We may also assume that, pending a very fundamental reevaluation of contemporary economic and political priorities -- the sort of thing most likely to be triggered by a global crisis, if at all -- we will remain on course to push the upper edges of the available models for some years to come. Research tends to lag the realities. In current terms, I would speculate, there is now something like a 25% chance that world temperature levels will rise to a point that will severely or entirely curtail life, as we know it, within the next generation or so. Concerted political will to change the momentum in that direction will perhaps not develop for another seven to ten years, when the Arctic will no longer provide its recent summer cooling -- when, that is, summers begin to become unbearable to the point of provoking serious political will. A rapid rise in sea levels could provoke that sort of willpower, but there does not seem to be an ice shelf or chunk large enough to raise sea levels, other than Greenland's, and at present it seems that one will be slow to hit the water. Riots over food shortages due to drought would be another possibility, but that too seems at least several years away in the developed world.

Speculation on Mass Relocation in the U.S.

This is another speculative piece. I haven't researched it. It's based on general reading. It may be entirely mistaken. The purpose of posting it is to advance thinking on the subject, for me and for anyone else who may read it. * * * * * Water is becoming increasingly scarce in large sections of the country. There are no immediately obvious signs that this trend will reverse in the foreseeable future. Desalination of ocean water could make a substantial difference at some point, but I understand that process is energy-intensive, the plants have not yet begun to be constructed, it is not clear how much that water would cost or how much would be available, and generally that solution is years away. The U.S. population continues to grow, from births and from immigration. Much of that growth occurs in places like Los Angeles. The present impression is that, at some point, water supply will fall short of water demand. There will be some hardships. Those will tend to fall especially on those who cannot arrange filtration, bottling, or other sources of water. Hurricane Katrina seemed to say that poor people will stay where they are, to some large extent, even if doing so will cost them their lives. It is not likely that the entire populations of L.A. slums, barrios, and ghettos will pack up and leave town. But for some lower-income families, greener parts of the country will seem very, very appealing, just as they do for a Chinese friend who views this greenery with eyes that have seen large quantities of barrenness and environmental degradation in her home country. L.A. generally is said to be due for a substantial correction in real estate prices. It is not clear what will happen to those who then find themselves upside down, financially speaking. Some of them will become renters and, as such, will be more mobile. Given the growing odds of a recession, it is not clear whether, or when, large numbers of these people will once again be buying real estate in southern California. They, too -- these members of the middle class -- may find themselves going elsewhere. In short, these forces -- water shortage, real estate price correction, recession -- may augur some migration of lower- and middle-income workers away from previous high-growth places like southern California (along with other western cities, e.g., Phoenix, Las Vegas). It appears possible, then, that other cities will import some of the problems that places like L.A. have experienced in recent years. Cities to the north and east may increasingly experience a different and more shocking kind of crime, for example, and a corresponding increase in police brutality. Population pressures already exist in those other places: many already have their own water concerns, for example, and many will be struggling to find jobs for the people who are already there. A large migration is possible, though of course not certain; and if it did occur, one could expect some locals to put up legal and informal barriers against out-of-towners. As an example of an informal barrier, some communities (in e.g., the Midwest) could witness a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, based upon fear of a perceived threat posed by incoming black or Hispanic people. There was something of an exodus from southern California in the 1980s, based (if memory serves) upon a reversal in the housing market. In that instance, it seemed that transplants went especially to the Pacific Northwest and to Denver, though they also populated previously remote patches in places like Idaho and Montana. That exodus may predict, to some extent, what would happen this time around. But prices are not as low (in some of those northern locations) and water supplies are not as reliable (in e.g., Denver) as they were a quarter-century ago. Sooner or later, if trends continue, water (and perhaps financial) pressures may scoot people along, either to the Northwest or to the Midwest. People who have been burned by real estate investments, and who perhaps bear the scars on their credit ratings, may not be in a position to bid up real estate to its former levels for quite some time. Even if they were so inclined, they may lack the means. In the present time of tightening credit, it appears that it will be many years before lenders return to their previous liberal attitude toward supplying mortgages. Again, water is an issue, and as I commented previously, so is the ability of municipalities to keep the basic services coming. So it appears that there may be more demand for rental property than for ownership, for some time. That demand may be increased if people become more concerned about retaining mobility -- about not being financially trapped again in, say, a house in San Diego or a condo in Tucson. The concept of home ownership could thus, conceivably, be entering a period of long-term revision. Depending on how things shake out, it could be decades before the general public re-embraces the notion that it is normal, natural, sensible, and affordable to buy a house. That notion is still very much rooted in our culture, and it would take a lot to shake it; but the forces in motion now are so monumental as to pose that kind of possibility. You really cannot have the American Dream without water. And if that notion does get shaken, then some fundamental assumptions about life in the U.S. will be in flux. Do I expect this? Eventually, yes, of course, in some form. India is a case study in how far population growth can go, and how far the people of a nation can go in endorsing extremes of wealth and poverty. The U.S. is not India, obviously. But it presently appears that extremes of wealth are accepted in the United States, and that they are influential in manipulating the government and the media, and generally in creating conditions for their own expansion. We will have substantially more people in the future, and we will keep on having them. We will have them at an accelerating rate, I would expect, if the affordabilty of a good education becomes increasingly problematic for the people who live here -- if, that is, education in the future serves less of its traditional role in mitigating birth rates. There is just not enough water. (And, eventually, there will not be enough affordable food, for all these people. If we are able to convert food to fuel while people in Africa are starving, eventually we will be able to do something of that nature while people in the U.S. are starving -- as, indeed, some already are). It will surely not all turn out precisely this way. This has been a merely speculative piece. Its gist is that there are forces at work, pertaining to the economy and also to resources like water, that seem likely to encourage migration of large numbers of people away from some cities toward others; and that if such migrations do occur, they will have their own consequences on such things as attitudes toward race (in some places, at least) and on the sort of dwelling that a sensible person will be inclined to seek.

Speculation on Home Prices

The real estate news is bad. Some are now saying it will be 2009, at the earliest, before property values recover. Apparently the tax base for cities is eroding because of the decline in home values and the rise in foreclosures. An ordinary house is an expensive thing. Not just in terms of what it costs, but also in terms of what we take for granted about it. In that regard, four basics are lately coming into question: financing, transportation, public services, and water. On the financial front, house prices have risen because we have had money, and have been willing to spend that money on our homes. We have had money, in the earlier years, because America was a rich country and getting richer and, in the later years, because foreign investors could make money by lending their money here. That second tenet is now failing because the value of the dollar has been falling. They say that a foreign investor -- an Asian investor, say -- who invested in the stock market in 2000 has lost money, despite the Dow's rise, because the dollars in which stocks are priced have lost so much value. The dollar fall has not stopped; indeed, it may have a ways to go. Thus, foreigners are increasingly looking to invest elsewhere. Transportation becomes an issue when people cannot afford to get to the place in question. As long as the money is there, the government can keep building highways, people can keep buying cars, and cars can keep burning gas. This piece of the puzzle is still in place. But gas is becoming more expensive as it becomes rarer for us (you don't find much oil in the Quaker State anymore). Hopefully the experts will develop vehicles that run on alternate fuels -- hopefully other than biofuels, which entail the questionable water- and (for some countries) starvation-intensive prospect of, basically, burning food. But it still costs money to build highways, and rising numbers of people still have to jostle for space on increasingly congested roads. In the long term, we would have been further ahead if we invested in mass transit. But the point here is that there are limits to urban sprawl. One, long known, is that people won't drive five hours each way to work. But another, less familiar, is that suburbs may not keep expanding outwards forever. At some point, there may be a frontier where you are essentially gentrifying -- where you are buying a piece of land that, in the past, was not used for purposes of housing your kind of people, and you are betting that it will be continue to be used for that purpose in the future. And some of those people on the fringe, in some places, may have bet wrong. The ability to build highways goes along with the ability to provide public services generally. Again, as long as the money is there, there is no problem. But cities are running into difficulty now. Their tax bases are taking a hit because of the drop in house prices and the rising number of foreclosures. Empty houses don't generate tax revenues, in which case cities can't provide everything we have gotten used to. With fewer people paying property taxes, and those taxes not rising at the expected rates, cities will have to increase fees and taxes if they are to keep providing the services we expect. For each additional $50 per month of property taxes and other service fees, there will be some people who are priced out of the housing market. So the drop in the tax base may have its own self-perpetuating dynamic to some extent: as fewer pay, costs rise, so even fewer can afford to pay. Among those public services, water is particularly worrisome. There is not enough of it, and there will be less. Even if the cities could continue to afford to supply the same levels of services, there have to be the resources for them to supply -- the water, in particular, but to an increasing extent the electricity as well, particularly during peak periods. There is no long-term plan in place, at present, for resolving the nation's (never mind the world's) shortages of water, electricity, or, for that matter, food. We have largely squandered the opportunities we have had to take leadership in such matters during the past two generations. It will be harder for us to do so in the future. China will run into extreme problems along these lines before we do, but we will have those problems too; and to the extent that China owns us, there may be some very interesting deals made in the future. Most likely wars will be fought for such things, and they will not always be wars involving uniformed armies. If you are a homeowner, you are valuable to the wealthy people only as long as you continue to be a vehicle for production of wealth. The system on which you have been that sort of vehicle is now undergoing extensive modification. Your house is becoming a less reliable way of creating transactions in which realtors, lawyers, bankers, et al. become wealthy, and that means that your own value is declining: you are no longer capable of serving as a conduit for the generation of wealth through the automatic operation of a system of rising house prices. If you are to continue to have value in this system, you must achieve it by having stable, good-paying employment and an ongoing ability to make your house payments. Of course, you may still be vulnerable to a decline in your home's value, to the point that some people will be working to make payments on a combination of mortgage and home equity loan that puts them under water. In other words, some will ask themselves why they are struggling to keep a house that's worth less than they owe on it. Regardless of your own stability, your operative assumptions will continue to mutate as your neighbors ask themselves questions of this sort. The time to buy is when nobody wants the thing you are buying -- assuming, of course, that they will want it later. The time to sell is when everyone wants the thing you are selling -- assuming that you won't then have to turn around and buy it back at a higher price later. When *everyone* was buying a house, when it was *obvious* that everyone should buy a house -- that was the time to sell. People will be buying shelter again in the future. It is not yet clear what form of shelter will be most attractive. Resource questions will likely influence this issue.