The New York Times highlights an article, To Catch Cairo Overflow, 2 Megacities Rise in the Sand, about two new cities that the government of Egypt is building in sands outside monstrous Cairo to hold seven million people between them.

The reporter seems rather aghast about it all, but the odd (but increasingly familiar) thing about the article is that there's little discussion of the underlying reason: Egypt's population growth. The population of Egypt is now approaching 84 million, having doubled in the last third of a century. The latest UN population projection is that Egypt will hit 130 million by 2050.

Third World population growth is becoming an unmentionable in the press. There's nothing much more fundamental in human affairs than population, but we talk about it less and less.

This reflects the general anti-reductionist trend in Western thought. As the education level of the elites rise, the popularity of Occam's Razor seems to decline. Who wants to figure out the simplest way to comprehend how things basically work when it's better for your career to assert that everything's very, very complicated, and only an expert like yourself could possibly begin to grasp the complexities of it all?