After the Spike
Population, Progress, and the Case for People
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
What if the challenge for humanity’s future is not too many people on a crowded planet, but too few people to sustain the progress that the world needs?
Most people on Earth today live in a country where birth rates already are too low to stabilize the population: fewer than two children for every two adults. In After the Spike, economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso sound a wakeup call, explaining why global depopulation is coming, why it matters, and what to do now.
It would be easy to think that fewer people would be better—better for the planet, better for the people who remain. This book invites us all to think again. Despite what we may have been told, depopulation is not the solution we urgently need for environmental challenges like climate change. Nor will it raise living standards by dividing what the world can offer across fewer of us. Spears and Geruso investigate what depopulation would mean for the climate, for living standards, for equity, for progress, for freedom, for humanity’s general welfare. And what it would mean if, instead, people came together to share the work of caregiving and of building societies where parenting fits better with everything else that people aspire to.
With new evidence and sharp insights, Spears and Geruso make a lively and compelling case for stabilizing the population—without sacrificing our dreams of a greener future or reverting to past gender inequities. They challenge us to see how depopulation threatens social equity and material progress, and how welcoming it denies the inherent value of every human life. More than an assembly of the most important facts, After the Spike asks what future we should want for our planet, for our children, and for one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As the global population growth rate begins to decline, governments should make concerted efforts to keep population replacement levels steady, according to this stimulating study. Economists and demographers Spears (Where India Goes) and Geruso propose that the world's population will spike at "10 billion within a few decades" and then will decline precipitously. Depopulation would be disastrous at such a scale—not only for society (since a population that trends more elderly triggers myriad challenges) but also, the authors intriguingly assert, for the environment. Global depopulation, rather than reduce environmental degradation, would, with a shrinking working-age population, slow down technological progress, raise the fixed costs of doing business, and decrease funding for the very governments and programs that defend the environment. Thus, the authors advocate for a government-led effort to "stabilize" the global population at 10 billion, through gentle social-welfare methods like cash allotments to couples who choose to have children. The authors make a strong argument that such a decline really is on the horizon, noting that "nobody fully understands low birth rates," since many former commonsense explanations like women's increased rights have begun to be dismissed by researchers. Though somewhat dry, this offers important food for thought for those concerned about climate change.
