Academic Demographers Voice Growing Concerns Over Irreversible Global Depopulation

In their new book After the Spike, demographers Dean Spears and Michael Geruso make the counterintuitive case for worrying less about overpopulation and more about depopulation. Comparing it to climate change, they say population shrinkage is coming and once it starts it could be hard to stop.

The highest number of births the planet has ever seen was in 2012, when 146 million children were born. The global population has continued to increase since then, even though the birth rate has fallen, largely because the world has gotten better at preventing the deaths of children. But now people are having smaller families, and in the next half century or so, death rates will exceed birth rates. That's what the two associate professors of economics at the University of Texas at Austin refer to as "the spike," the period of sharp growth and possibly equally sharp decline in population.


Spears, who is also the founder of r.i.c.e., the Research Institute of Compassionate Economics, which is focused on child health in Uttar Pradesh, has seen this process happen in real time in India where the average birth rate (i.e. the average number of children a woman will give birth to in her lifetime) has dropped to fewer than two as the country has got more prosperous.

TIME spoke to Spears and Geruso about why there should not be fewer people on a planet that feels like it's straining to sustain the 8 billion we have, why people around the world are choosing to keep their families small, and what, if anything, should be done.

Why the World Needs More People, According to These Experts

The fickle nature of scientific consensus is one of the more interesting phenomenons to me. I happen to think they might be right this time.

 

See the impending economic depopulation crisis in China as exhibit A for the consequences that can be involved in societal depopulation. What it means for the generations in countries where there are not enough children to take care of them is many of them will die in a government facility without any family to take care of them. See what the Obama administration did with the VA, and you have a good picture of what a begrudging government taking care of people it views as a draining inconvenience on the government's income statement looks like. We should never forget the government does not love you like your family does. The generations who allow this to happen to themselves bring this on themselves.