Description
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.
About the Author
Dr. Michael Geruso is an economic demographer, public economist, and associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2023 to 2024, he served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he advised on issues of health and demography. He holds bachelor’s degrees in engineering, political science, and philosophy. He earned his PhD in economics from Princeton and completed postdoctoral work at Harvard prior to joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. Since 2014, he has served on the board of the Research Institute of Compassionate Economics (r.i.c.e.). He is an affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and of the Population Research Center at UT-Austin. His work has been published in top peer-reviewed outlets including the American Economic Review,the Journal of Political Economy,and Demography,and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Vox, The Atlantic, and The Economist.
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