👶 Bracing for depopulation: My chat (+transcript) with 'After the Spike' coauthor Dean Spears

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Global population growth is slowing, and it’s not showing any signs of recovery. To the environmentalists of the 1970s, this may have seemed like a movement in the right direction. The drawbacks to population decline, however, are severe and numerous, and they’re not all obvious.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with economist and demographer Dean Spears about the depopulation trend that is transcending cultural barriers and ushering in a new global reality. We discuss the costs to the economy and human progress, and the inherent value of more people.

Spears is an associate professor of economics at Princeton University where he studies demography and development. He is also the founding executive director of r.i.c.e., a nonprofit research organization seeking to uplift children in rural northern India. He is a co-author with Michael Geruso of After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People.

In This Episode

* Where we’re headed (1:32)

* Pumping the breaks (5:41)

* A pro-parenting culture (12:40)

* A place for AI (19:13)

* Preaching to the pro-natalist choir (23:40)

* Quantity and quality of life (28:48)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Where we’re headed (1:32)

. . . two thirds of people now live in a country where the birth rate is below the two children per two adults level that would stabilize the population.

Pethokoukis: Who are you and your co-author trying to persuade and what are you trying to persuade them of? Are you trying to persuade them that global depopulation is a real thing, that it's a problem? Are you trying to persuade them to have more kids? Are you trying to persuade them to support a certain set of pro-child or pro-natalist policies?

Spears: We are trying to persuade quite a lot of people of two important things: One is that global depopulation is the most likely future — and what global depopulation means is that every decade, every generation, the world's population will shrink. That's the path that we're on. We're on that path because birth rates are low and falling almost everywhere. It’s one thing we're trying to persuade people of, that fact, and we're trying to persuade people to engage with a question of whether global depopulation is a future to welcome or whether we should want something else to happen. Should we let depopulation happen by default or could it be better to stabilize the global population at some appropriate level instead?

We fundamentally think that this is a question that a much broader section of society, of policy discourse, of academia should be talking about. We shouldn't just be leaving this discussion to the population scientists, demographic experts, not only to the people who already are worried about, or talking about low birth rates, but this is important enough and unprecedented enough that everybody should be engaging in this question. Whatever your ongoing values or commitments, there's a place for you in this conversation.

Is it your impression that the general public is aware of this phenomenon? Or are they still stuck in the ’70s thinking that population is running amok and we’ll have 30 billion people on this planet like was the scenario in the famous film, Soylent Green? I feel like the people I know are sort of aware that this is happening. I don't know what your experience is.

I think it's changing fast. I think more and more people are aware that birth rates are falling. I don't think that people are broadly aware — because when you hear it in the news, you might hear that birth rates in the United States have fallen low or birth rates in South Korea have fallen low. I think what not everybody knows is that two thirds of people now live in a country where the birth rate is below the two children per two adults level that would stabilize the population.

I think people don't know that the world's birth rate has fallen from an average around five in 1950 to about 2.3 today, and that it's still falling and that people just haven't engaged with the thought that there's no special reason to expect it to stop and hold it to. But the same processes that have been bringing birth rates down will continue to bring them down, and people don't know that there's no real automatic stabilizer to expect it to come back up. Of the 26 countries that have had the lifetime birth rate fall below 1.9, none of them have had it go back up to two.

That's a lot of facts that are not as widely known as they should be, but then the implication of it, that if the world's birth rate goes below two and stays there, we're going to have depopulation generation after generation. I think for a lot of people, they're still in the mindset that depopulation is almost conceptually impossible, that either we're going to have population growth or something else like zero population growth like people might've talked about in the ’70s. But the idea that a growth rate of zero is just a number and then that it's not going to stop there, it's going to go negative, I think that's