"Things are looking up." (Matt Ridley, author)

I had the doubtful pleasure of another chat with my old pal Rob the other day. He was philosophizing. He's a bit of an idiot savant , I'm positive, and he's inclined to spout off that way. He has these bright moments but, most of the time he has that dazed, distant look of someone recently recovering from an alien abduction.

We were leaning on the dilapidated fence around Rob's yard and he said, "The birthrate in the world is going down due to information about contraception and that the concept that huge families are not a good idea." This from the second youngest in a family of six, so I feigned interest. "In the twentieth century we doubled the population of the world but this century we'll only go up about one and a half times."

"This is because you never found a woman to live with you," I joshed and wondered if I was expected to help refurbish the fence this trip or later.

Rob pasted on that vacant look that served him so well in the years he spent in grade nine. "After the war, the Americans tried to persuade the Japanese to reduce the size of their families but they weren't playing that game," said Rob.

"Reckoned that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had done that already," I suggested as that fence creaked and threatened to fall down there and then.

"Nah!" offered my buddy. "But when they started seeing Yank movies with rich houses, tons of cars, swimming pools and stuff but hardly any kids, they got the idea. Guess that's happening in Africa too. Everyone's packing a cell phone there, I hear."

"You been reading something?" I asked after all this erudition, and, at the same time, wondering what cell phones had to do with population reduction, then said, "Bet you've been watching P.B.S. or Knowledge."

"Mom was glommed on to a Jane Austin show the other night," said Rob without admitting watching anything educational. "She doesn't realize that most of the folks in Jane Austin's day couldn't afford a single candle and could certainly never go to a ball all gussied up to dance under chandeliers. I kept telling her that and explaining that most folks back then smelled pretty rank too, but she never listens. She's off in la la land."

Rob probably was by that time.

We met again when he persuaded me to go fishing with him. He's got a wreck of a row-boat and I fear for my life each time we go out in it. We'd just settled over a 'hole guaranteed to produce great lake trout' when Rob said, "In spite of this crap about countries going belly up in Europe, the whole world's not that way." I watched my float bobbing gentle in the slight breeze while Rob maundered on. "Some countries are up to their necks in debt but other parts are doing real well."

I waited to hear what was coming next from genius companion, who'd quit school after two attempts at grade ten and hadn't got himself a regular job since.

"In the eighties and nineties, Africa was going slowly backwards..."

"Like us," I commented and grabbed the rustic oars.

Rob was unperturbed. "Now they're going forward but it's the rich that are getting richer."

I was rowing by this time as the wind had picked up and we were heading out into mid-lake where the boat was likely to sink with all hands, including me.

"You know, the famous Black Death over the Europe wasn't all a bad thing," said Rob another day as he helped my shovel my drive-way. "After that, there was a labour shortage so folk could bargain for better wages."

I conceded that this was handy as, unlike Bob, folk couldn't go trotting off to the unemployment office in the old days, but there are times when I wonder if maybe Rob is an actual savant and I'm the idiot that worked all his life. He sure keeps me guessing.