Still, the headline is negative, as if a bad thing has happened. Take a look at Figure 1-1 and make your judgment, please. My own judgment is that the overall picture is good for blacks as well as for the community as a whole, because many fewer babies are dying nowadays than in earlier years and many fewer parents need to grieve. Unless you focus only on the relative situation of the two groups, there seems slim basis for judging the situation as bad, unless you enjoy being morally indignant. The contradiction often happens because persons judge from different points of view.
More people are an economic benefit in the long run, though they are a burden in the short run.
In this introduction I will first review some important absolute trends in human welfare. To repeat, my thesis is that just about every important measure of human welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries. On that latter subject, what you read below was a minority viewpoint until sometime in the 1980s, at which time the mainstream scientific opinion shifted almost all the way to the position set forth here. In Figure 1-2 we see that it took thousands of years for life expectancy at birth to increase from just over 20 years to the high 20's. Then in just the past two centuries, the length of life you could expect for your newborn child in the advanced countries jumped from perhaps 30 years to about 75 years.