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A-: Makes V For Vendetta Look Fluffy
Tuesday, 21 November 2006 09:13 amOne of the weird offshoots of contemporary medical aid is the ridiculously cheap movies. Clearly Random Junky Cinema is good for your health. Go figure. But this did mean that for a mere smattering of groats, courtesy of jo's medical aid, I got to see Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men on Sunday afternoon. ( Oo, er, is all I can say. Oo, er, and spoilers. )
The film's horribly bleak and horribly likely vision of a dystopian, apocalyptic England was all the more telling because I've just read Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, a surprisingly readable and beguiling piece of analysis which basically puts statistical reasoning behind everything I've ever believed anyway. The chapter that most got me leaping about the room punching the air and shouting "Yes! I knew it!" was the one on the effect on American crime statistics of Roe vs. Wade. American crime levels apparently went significantly down in the 1990s, despite media trumpeting to the contrary; sifting out all the self-congratulatory bollocks about policing methods et al, Levitt comes up with a glaring correlation: twenty years earlier, Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal, easy and cheap in the US. This means an entire generation of unplanned, unwanted children were never born into precisely the kind of unprepared, low-income households who would have given them precisely the disadvantaged upbringing and lack of education necessary to turn them into criminals in their teens.
I look at Children of Men, with its London rife with filthy streets, graffiti, random explosions and government brutality, and I project fifteen years into the future the current abysmally stupid policy of giving subsidies and council houses to pregnant teens, and I see the same kind of chaos, although for precisely the opposite reason. A herd of stupid, selfish, short-sighted girls are being encouraged to give birth to basically unwanted children who will be raised in precisely the kind of uneducated, low-income, single-parent household which will give them precisely the disadvantaged upbringing and lack of education necessary to turn them into criminals in their teens. In a couple of decades Britain is going to have the kind of crime and population problems which are going to look uncomfortably like a cinematic vision of apocalypse.
Everything comes down to population eventually. Everything. Mark my words.
The film's horribly bleak and horribly likely vision of a dystopian, apocalyptic England was all the more telling because I've just read Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, a surprisingly readable and beguiling piece of analysis which basically puts statistical reasoning behind everything I've ever believed anyway. The chapter that most got me leaping about the room punching the air and shouting "Yes! I knew it!" was the one on the effect on American crime statistics of Roe vs. Wade. American crime levels apparently went significantly down in the 1990s, despite media trumpeting to the contrary; sifting out all the self-congratulatory bollocks about policing methods et al, Levitt comes up with a glaring correlation: twenty years earlier, Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal, easy and cheap in the US. This means an entire generation of unplanned, unwanted children were never born into precisely the kind of unprepared, low-income households who would have given them precisely the disadvantaged upbringing and lack of education necessary to turn them into criminals in their teens.
I look at Children of Men, with its London rife with filthy streets, graffiti, random explosions and government brutality, and I project fifteen years into the future the current abysmally stupid policy of giving subsidies and council houses to pregnant teens, and I see the same kind of chaos, although for precisely the opposite reason. A herd of stupid, selfish, short-sighted girls are being encouraged to give birth to basically unwanted children who will be raised in precisely the kind of uneducated, low-income, single-parent household which will give them precisely the disadvantaged upbringing and lack of education necessary to turn them into criminals in their teens. In a couple of decades Britain is going to have the kind of crime and population problems which are going to look uncomfortably like a cinematic vision of apocalypse.
Everything comes down to population eventually. Everything. Mark my words.
