1180: Dean Spears | The Quiet Apocalypse of Global Depopulation

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The population is a huge ship, slow to turn.

If you have a kid today, they're going to be deciding whether or not to have a kid in, say, 30 years, right?

And 30 years from now is when decarbonization needs to be well underway

or maybe done, right?

So the timing of population decline just doesn't line up with the urgency of what needs to happen on climate change.

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Today we're talking about the population crisis, but maybe not in the way you're thinking.

Instead of too many people on the planet, Today's guest argues that we're actually headed for a population crash.

Like me, this might sound like good news to you, but today's guest, Dean Spears, is here to convince us that it's not.

From fewer ideas and innovation to fewer hands available to clean up the messes of tomorrow that we're making today, of course, planet Earth is heading towards a crisis from which it might actually be impossible to recover.

All right, here we go with Dean Spears.

Your book, After the Spike, it's about depopulation.

So not about having too many people, but about having too few.

And this, for people like me, I should say, is maybe it's a little bit backwards as I've been led to believe that we have way too many people on this planet already.

But actually, global depopulation is the most likely future.

And so what depopulation means is that every decade, every generation, the world's population will shrink.

And that's the path we're on, that in a few decades, the world's population will begin to decline.

And once that happens, there's no reason to think it'll automatically reverse.

And so a big question before us is, should we welcome that or should we want something else to happen?

Because I'm thinking, okay, sounds good.

We need less people, right?

Don't we need less people?

We want them.

I mean, look, I don't want them all to die at once.

Well, that is the story that we hear.

Yeah, but in fact, depopulation won't solve climate change or reduce global poverty or make the world fairer.

And we stand to lose something very important because people are a core ingredient in scientific and social progress.

People help you get what you want.

Other people are win-win.

Their lives are good for them and good for you.

Okay, I want to get into the details on some of this because, of course, my three counter arguments to why we don't need more people are, hey, it's going to help with competition for resources.

It's going to stop global warming, water use, land, food, all that stuff.

I guess we'll get into the details on that later because you just popped all those bubbles with one sentence.

But tell me how the population has changed over time.

Because when I was younger, it was like, I don't know what the population was, 4 billion or something.

And it was like, oh, my God, what are we going to do?

How are we going to survive this?

Everything is going to implode in global warming and housing and food.

We're all going to starve to death.

And that didn't happen.

We have twice as many people now.

So for a very long time, the size of the world population was pretty flat.

10,000 years ago, there were less than 5 million people.

That's about the size of Metro Atlanta.

And that started to change a few hundred years ago as we got better at keeping one another alive and especially keeping children alive.

through things like sanitation and the germ theory of disease and better nutrition.

So there were a billion of of us in 1800, doubling to 2 billion 100 years later and quadrupling since then.

So the only thing that you and I have ever known has been a world where the population's been growing fast.

And all the while, living standards around the world have been improving.

Other progress has been happening too.

But actually, that period of population growth has been really brief.

That's why we call it the spike in the world population.

But the thing is, the spike is coming to an end.

Within the lifetime of a baby born today, chances are the size of the world population is going to peak and then begin to decline.

And what's remarkable is that decline could be just as fast, just as exponential as the upslope.

When will we peak?

What number will we peak at and when might this happen?

So nobody knows for sure.

The UN puts it in the 2080s at around 10 billion people, but other groups of demographers and population scientists put it even sooner, seeing that birth rates seem to be dropping faster than people have recently thought.

There's a group in Europe that thinks it's going to be in the 2060s.

The critical thing is, of course, the year when the number of deaths is greater than the number of births.

And the number of deaths has been going down, but the number of births has been going down too, all along.

And so, what's going to happen is we're getting close to the point where the world's going to have an average of two births per two adults.

That's the dividing line.

And not very long after that, we'll hit that year of depopulation.

I see.

So you wrote in the book within 300 years,

peak population of 10 billion could fall below 2 billion.

That's pretty stark to reduce the population by 80%.

Think of it this way.

If we've quadrupled in the past hundred years, right?

It's the same sort of logic that could apply, just in the other direction.

And so if the birth rate goes to an average of 1.5 kids per two adults, which is what it is in Europe right now, pretty close to what it is in the U.S.

or Canada, 1.5 kids per two adults would cause the population to drop by about 10% per decade or about two-thirds per century.

So that's the sort of thing that isn't outlandish.

It's something that if you've been to Canada or Europe or Vermont for that matter, you've seen something that could cause a fall in the size of the population that rapid.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

I hadn't thought about that.

But how does it happen?

It's not just people getting killed in conflict or war or starving to death, right?

This is just a natural course of life and people having fewer kids.

Right.

It's not about people being killed.

In fact, death rates, the biggest picture, I mean, not that there aren't fluctuations like COVID or something, but death rates in the biggest picture have been falling for a very long time, which is why the population grew, because more of the babies who were born did survive.

But the thing that we often overlook or don't notice is that all along, truly for centuries, birth rates have been falling too.

So all this time, while we've been going up the spike and the population's been growing, people have been having fewer children on average.

It was around six in 1800 for the world as a whole, five and a half in 1950, and half of that today.

So it's not that people have been having more children, and that's why the population's been growing.

It's the numbers of births have been falling.

And now, since death can only go so low, since the fraction of babies who die at the start of life can only go as low as zero, eventually the number of births is going to have to pass below that.

I see.

Okay.

So this is a natural cycle of life, just to be clear, because I think a lot of people go, oh, well, they're counting on these crazy events.

In fact, I thought when COVID hit and they were showing pictures in India of people just being locked in buildings, like I really thought we're going to see.

100 million people die in India.

It's just going to be crazy.

And that's not what happened, thankfully.

But by the news cycle in the beginning of COVID, when everybody was panicking, I was just thinking, oh my God, this is going to be just a legendary sort of biblical plague level of event in places like India where they can't get medical treatment and they're all penned in.

And it was very bad.

But yeah, and I go to India a lot.

I work in India.

And what's striking is how much society has just continued on its way after.

I mean, that's a whole nother story, what people can adapt to.

But yeah, I think what is amazing about the situation that we're in of the big change of global depopulation coming is just how normal the family sizes that are going to lead to it are going to be.

And if you're in the United States right now, the United States has an average birth rate of 1.6, right?

Here in Texas, it's 1.8, right?

So those are numbers below two kids per two adults, and that's going to cause depopulation.

But it's not like life feels that different than it would feel in a society that was at, say, 2.1 or 2.2.

I mean, if you were around in the 90s or the early 2000s, you remember that.

Going to the grocery store, jogging around the lake, it's probably going to feel pretty similar in life.

But we've crossed this profound threshold where now we're on the path to depopulation and you might not have even noticed or seen when your society crossed that line of two.

What happens when birth rates dip below replacement?

Can't we come up with policies or something to get people to have more kids?

I know nothing about this, but I know countries have tried to do this.

No, you're exactly right that many countries around the world have said that they're trying to do something about this.

And it basically hasn't ever worked anywhere.

One way of looking at it, China's birth rate is at one, right?

Which is extremely low, even though they're saying that it's a policy of China to increase the birth rate.

But at one in China, even though they're talking about it, there are many countries out there where governments say we either have a tax credit or a child care policy or just exhortation, just getting on TV and saying have more kids.

But of the 26 countries that we can see in the data that lifetime birth rates have ever fallen below 1.9, averaging over a woman's lifetime, none of them ever have gone back up above two yet.

So zero for 26.

And many of those are places where governments say they're trying to do something about it.

Yeah, because China, they have the one child policy for people who don't know, and that ended, I don't even know, in the aughts.

I can't even remember when that changed, but it had been going for such a long time.

People had one kid, and then, you know, Korea and Japan are trying to get people to have kids.

I'll have to take your word for it if it's not working, but it's just got to be tough.

I'll ask why it's not working, but I will posit that it's got to be tough to tell people, hey, have more kids and we'll pay for daycare.

And it's like, yeah, the problem is I still have to take care of the kid and pay for everything.

Exactly.

Here's a thought experiment that I sometimes ask people to ask themselves.

So these government programs that might offer, say, a few thousand dollars or something, either in the form of paying for daycare or a child tax credit or something, like, would you have married somebody different for $4,000?

No, right?

Nobody has ever said yes to me on that one yet.

And so if people making their biggest picture family formation decisions where they're writing their own life story in their biography, no one's marrying somebody different for a few thousand dollars.

It makes sense that people aren't going to be having a radically different number of kids on average in response to a policy change like this.

So that's not to say nothing could ever change.

We wouldn't have written this book if we weren't optimistic that humanity could stabilize the population instead of depopulating.

But at the scale of the things that we've seen governments try so far, nobody has a solution for this.

Aaron Powell, it seems highly unlikely that you could simply economically incentivize people to have kids.

If you catch this problem early, you can.

Like, oh, I really wanted eight kids, but we really can only afford five.

Okay, what if schooling, college is free?

We subsidize your food.

We subsidize your housing so that you can have more space.

And it's like, well, I already have five.

What's the difference if I have a few more?

But people who have no kids or have one kid, they know that it's 10 times the amount of work to have three kids.

And you're just not going to get them to do that when you're like, I'll pay for your in-law unit and college.

It's like, what about the other 30 years that I got to deal with?

And you see growing up, you see your parents.

And so if you see your parents struggling with it, if a young woman sees her mom struggling and parenting is burdensome or unfair or difficult to combine with the other things that she aspires to in life, then yeah, she's going to grow up correctly perceiving that it's hard to do in ways a lot more than money.

So I think part of what we have here is an intergenerational challenge for our grandchildren, say, to feel like they can choose to have more children and fit it in with the other things they value in their lives, whether that's education or work or family or just sitting around playing video games with friends, right?

Whatever it is you value, if you're going to be able to think, believe that you can fit it in with parenting too, then we have a lot to work to do, you know, showing the next generation that, so they can show the next generation that.

And then maybe we'll have people growing up feeling like they can aspire to more children.

But we're pretty far from that.

And it's not just a simple, let's pass a piece of legislation this year policy challenge.

What about pollution and people?

More people is more pollution, right?

There's garbage, there's carbon footprint, all of that stuff.

I think part of that is, right, people are polluting.

We do have big environmental challenges, and human activity causes greenhouse gas emissions and has other destructive consequences.

So it's really natural to think that the way to protect the environment is to have fewer humans.

But it turns out to be more complicated than just that story.

Because every time we've solved an environmental problem before, and we have addressed environmental problems before, it's been by changing what people do.

So let me give you an example.

Consider China in 2013, where the particulate matter air pollution was just truly terrible.

So this is breathing in tiny particles in the air.

They're sometimes called PM 2.5 based on their small diameter.

And it's just really bad stuff.

Like for children to breathe this in, it causes stunting and diseases.

It causes older adult mortality.

And in 2013, it was so bad in China that it was called the air apocalypse.

It was in, you know, international coverage.

The U.S.

Embassy said that it was 755 on a scale that goes up to 500.

Like international journalists were evacuated.

So awful in 2013.

So then what happened next?

In the decade that followed, the size of the Chinese population grew by 50 million people.

That's a lot.

That's the entire population of Canada or Argentina.

So if it's the case that more people always causes more pollution, then what happened to the particulate air pollution in China?

And the answer is that it got better.

It declined by half.

And that was because the people there changed what they did.

The policymakers just changed what they did.

They implemented new technologies, implemented regulations, they shut down coal-fired power plants.

They made different decisions.

And it's not just China.

Over the same decade, while the world's population has grown by over 750 million people, particulate air pollution has fallen for the world as a whole.

Every time we've addressed environmental challenges, whether it's banning CFCs to save the ozone layer in the 80s or taking lead out of gasoline in the 70s, or regulating sulfur dioxide in order to not have acid rain in the 90s.

That's always happened while the population's been growing.

It's been because of changing what people do, implementing new laws, implementing new technologies.

And that's the path to reducing humanity's environmental footprint.

Because it does, at first glance, seem like population is a good lever to pull.

to get lower carbon emissions.

But first of all, I remember CFCs from the weekly reader that we had as kids in elementary school.

And I was like, CFCs, and nobody could pronounce chlorofluorocarbons.

And I remember I was the only kid in class who could say it.

I think I probably was getting the same weekly readers.

Yeah, we all were, right?

It was from like Addison Wesley, one of this textbook publishers.

And I remember loving those things.

They're so interesting.

And then we never used them.

But that was the big thing, man.

Spray paint and all these making mattresses and stuff, hairspray.

Yeah.

Anything that sprayed and anything that had a chemical smell like the mattress you slept on that had 10 billion amounts of whatever CFCs being used to manufacture this thing.

And then it was, you're right, acid rain this, acid rain that.

And then I kind of went to college and just never heard about it again.

Yeah, I didn't really think that I was hearing about climate change as an important challenge until, I don't know, high school or something.

It was these other problems that now, if you have another kid today, they're not adding more to the ozone hole depletion because they're not using CFCs.

Yeah, and the ozone thing kind of wrapped itself up.

I'm not going to try and disagree with an expert here, but it will sound like I'm doing that.

I'm a little bit against being like, eh, we'll just change the technology and it'll be fine.

I know you're not totally doing that, but it sounds to some people like, okay, so CFCs in the 80s, we just banned them.

Okay, no, so I'm not saying it's going to be automatic.

It's going to be a huge political fight.

Yes.

The book that I wrote before this one was about particle air pollution in India, saying that how terrible it is for children's health there and how they need to shut down coal plants and find some other ways, probably they're politically not going to choose to do that.

So I don't want to undersell the political fight here, but I also don't want us to get distracted from the political fight that we need to have by thinking that depopulation, which is not going to start for decades, is going to somehow be the solution that gets us off the hook for today's environmental challenges.

I understand the temptation to think that in a challenge as huge as climate change, depopulation could at least help, right?

But the problem is that the population is a huge ship, slow to turn.

If you have a kid today, they're going to be deciding whether or not to have a kid in, say, 30 years, right?

And 30 years from now is when decarbonization needs to be well underway or maybe done, right?

So the timing of population decline just doesn't line up with the urgency of what needs to happen on climate change.

Yeah, I see what you mean.

And it also seems like we can't build nuclear power plants in under a friggin' half century for some reason either.

I don't really understand that.

That's a different podcast, probably.

Yeah, I know.

I mean, back on the topic of India and coal plants, if we want to do something useful for the world, then let's volunteer to build nuclear power plants for every Indian district and maybe have the experts in France run them or something.

See, it seems like this is a totally different show, and I'm going to get emails about why we should or should not do that.

But let's stay on topic.

So you wrote in the book that the lifetime climate footprint of babies born now and in the future, it keeps decreasing.

So basically, anybody born now has a lower carbon footprint than I did being born in 1980.

I mean, it's the same logic as the CFCs and the ozone hole.

Anybody born now isn't probably going to contribute to the hole in the ozone layer because they're not going to use CFCs.

And per-person carbon emissions have been falling in places like US and Europe, falling not as fast as they need to do, but they have been falling, which means that a new kid born today is going to contribute less to the stock of carbon emissions than we did.

And it also means that any sort of change that might happen in the trajectory of the population, this is another reason why it's going to be too late for that to have much of a difference for climate change.

Even on a pessimistic trajectory for decarbonization, even assuming that it takes the whole next 100 years to phase out carbon emissions, if the path of the population were to deviate a little bit today from its most likely path, that too would take many decades to turn into a change in the number of people, a change in the size of the population.

And so the exact time when emissions per person are going to be high, which is to say the near future, the coming years and decades, are going to be the time when no real change or deviation from the trajectory of the population could make much of a difference.

So, even a change in the population path that will eventually someday be big, all of that will happen on the tail end of our decarbonization challenge.

So, in short, if what you're caring about is climate change, and we should be caring about climate change, then let's focus on that.

Let's do something about that now when it's urgent, when emissions are high, and not think that anything that happens with the population, whether it's depopulation in six decades, or if we find a way to stabilize instead, is going to do anything to help us or frankly hurt us that much on our urgent climate challenges.

I see.

Yeah, that does make sense.

I was shocked to read that we're more sustainable than people in 1950 because you would just think they're using such lesser amount of electronics and they're driving less probably.

I guess efficiency of things has just gone way up like crazy.

Well, a kid born today is more efficient because they're going to live their lifetime out into a future where there is going to be ever less coal being burnt, right?

They're going to be getting their energy from wind or solar or nuclear, for example.

It's just 1950.

You just think, oh, there's a refrigerator in the house.

Everybody plays outside.

They all watch TV in one room together for a couple hours.

The end, how are they using more resources?

Sure, but a person born in 1950 was 40 in 1990.

That's right.

Yeah.

It's hard to think about the fact that there's just such a longer and higher footprint.

It's actually quite a short amount of time, I guess, in terms of the climate.

I just remember the madmen scene where they have the picnic in the park and then when they're done, they just take the blanket and they throw all the garbage and they just leave it and they go home.

And it's like, okay, well, maybe we are more sustainable than those types of people.

What do you attribute to declining birth rate?

You said we're less fertile, we're having fewer kids.

Why?

What's happening?

So the fundamental reason, exactly, you said, is birth rates, that birth rates are falling and falling for the role as a whole below this two kids per two adults dividing line.

But why are birth rates low and falling?

Here's what's so interesting is that everybody has a theory about this and everybody's theory is different.

And none of them really explain the bigness of falling birth rates.

The fact that birth rates have been falling for not just decades, but centuries, and that low birth rates are found around the world.

Two-thirds of people now live in a country where the birth rate is below two.

I study India.

So what often comes up is just how much of an exception India is.

So sometimes you'll hear social conservatives say that birth rates are falling because of the decline in marriage or the decline in religiosity or that people are having children so late.

But India is a place where almost everybody gets married.

Most of them are arranged marriages.

People tend to start having children relatively young, like in their early 20s.

And most people have religion has a role in their lives, Hinduism, Islam.

Yet India is now below two at around 1.9.

So, the fact that marriage remains common, the fact that people start having children early, also female labor force supply is really low there.

Another story that we sometimes hear as to why birth rates are low is that the conflict between career and family, especially for women.

And for Claudia Golden, the Nobel Prize-winning economist about gender, that's the title of her book, Career and Family.

And yet, we see India as an example there of a place with low birth rates, even though many women aren't in the labor force.

And so my point isn't that India explains everything.

In fact, just the opposite.

My point is that India as a great big country doesn't fit these trends.

And for almost every explanation or theory that you hear, you can find a country that's the exception.

You think the problem is too much feminism?

Look at South Korea, where it's a very unequal society.

The gender wage gap is as high as it is anywhere in the OECD, and the birth rate is really low.

Look at Latin America, where over 90% of people report being Christian in a Pew survey, and the birth rate's at 1.8.

You think the problem is too much capitalism?

Look at Northern Europe.

You think the problem is not enough capitalism?

Look at Texas.

There are exceptions everywhere.

Speaking of sustainability, here's some consumerism.

We'll be right back.

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All right, now back to Dean Spears.

I would definitely want to hear what you'd say to people who make the argument, hey, women, they can have jobs, they can choose to not be married and still survive.

They're not dependent on a man.

Women can get a divorce with no fault in many states and still end up with resources to survive.

That's contributing to lower birth rates.

So basically the argument that equality causes lower birth rates.

Can we address that a little bit?

I mean, you kind of touched on it, but it doesn't seem too crazy when you think about it.

Hey, I don't need to stay home.

Thus, I don't need to have a bunch of kids because I can have a career.

I can follow that logic, but you're saying that that's not necessarily going to explain the problem.

I'm saying that these sorts of career and family conflicts for women probably are very important in a lot of people's families and a lot of people's decisions.

But when you look at the biggest picture of low birth rates being something that's unfolding all around the world and has been for centuries, it just can't fit all the facts.

The birth rate in France in 1900 was three,

and that wasn't because they had solved all the gender inequality problems.

We already talked about South Korea, which is a pretty gender unequal society by all the measures that we have.

For example, the gender wage gap, and yet we see the lowest birth rate of all.

A place like Sweden, where we've over the last 10 years seen the birth rate fall from low to lower, from 1.8 to 1.4.

Is the story that you want to tell that Sweden was an exceptionally unequal society 10 years ago?

And I don't think that makes sense.

But there is something important here, which is

lots of people assume, or there's policy prescription that we hear, that the way to raise birth rates is to roll back the clock on gender equity, or that any sort of escaping of depopulation, if we were to stabilize the population instead, that would require things to be worse for women.

That's something that you hear some people advocating, and it's something that you hear other people worrying about and saying, we'd better just accept depopulation because we don't want to make things worse for women.

I think either way, there's an assumption there that it has to make things worse for women.

And I want to hold on that and push back on that assumption because hidden in that assumption, or maybe not even hidden in that assumption, is the presumption that children are especially women's responsibility.

And I think that doesn't have to be the case.

For sure, there are ways that having and bearing children burden women, that it doesn't burden men, but it takes a lot more than the nine months of pregnancy to make a child.

It takes long nights and long years thereafter to raise a child, and men can and should do more of that.

So, I think to those who would say that what we should be fundamentally thinking about here is women and what women are contributing, I would say there's a role for dads to contribute more.

And maybe if parenting had been something that we've all seen as everybody's job all along, then we wouldn't be so much in a challenge where people are looking at parenting and thinking, no, thank you.

Yeah, you're probably onto something there.

I know my wife would definitely agree with you as well.

What do you think of the whole reversal on abortion rights in the United States?

I don't want to get into the morality or religious elements of that because that's 10 hours of podcasting that I don't really feel like doing.

I'm thinking more in terms of population growth.

Some people say, hey, look, we need to be doing this for various reasons.

Some of those people have reasons that are more wholesome, maybe, than others for making that argument.

But basically, restricted abortion or forced birth, whatever you want to call it, what do you think of this in terms of the depopulation?

It almost seems like it's a drop in the bucket, but what do I know?

Exactly.

My own take as a voter is that I believe in reproductive freedom and access to contraception and abortion.

But as an economics professor who does statistics, let me tell you about some of the facts.

One is that we have in the past few years seen abortion access be restricted here here in Texas and that has not caused a giant spike up in the total fertility rate.

That hasn't brought the birth rate back up to replacement in part because people find what they need, such as medication abortion through telemedicine.

We can look at the data from South Korea again in 2017.

Amongst the sort of richer countries with good high quality data, South Korea was the only one that the Guttmacher Institute rated as abortion being basically restricted, and it also had the lowest birth rate of all of the countries in that data set.

That's not a randomized controlled experiment evidence or anything, but it is a fact to contend with if you want to say that banning abortion is a way to enduringly raise birth rates.

And I think biggest of all is the experience of Romania, where the dictator Ceausescu, talking about wanting higher birth rates for nationalist reasons, banned abortion in a particularly draconian way, instituting that mandatory pelvic exams for women at work to see if they were pregnant, for example, to really use the power of the state to try to ban abortion and raise birth rates.

And so what did you see in Romania when Decree 770, the name for this program, happened?

You see an immediate spike up in birth rates because some people might have been already pregnant or just weren't planning their lives around this.

But then, a few years thereafter, you see the birth rates start to fall.

And what's going on there is that people understand this is the law and they're making different decisions and not getting pregnant as much, for example.

And birth rates are falling pretty much in parallel to the rate that you see birth rates falling in other sort of similarly middle-income countries at the time, such that after some years pass, that the birth rate in Romania isn't that much higher than it would have been before the program.

Of course, this all ends with Ceaușescu being overthrown and killed, which is also another way in which this wasn't a sustainable policy that somebody might implement in order to try to change the population.

So the point is, government coercion, banning abortion, whatever your perspective on that, if your interest is the overall population wide birth rate and whether we're going to have depopulation or a stabilized population instead, government coercive programs like this can really influence and harm people's lives and take away their autonomy and wreck their ability to form the families they want and the careers they want.

It can hurt people, but it isn't powerful enough to get us off the path to depopulation, to stabilization instead, because people have shown that they'll find other ways.

Okay, so people either get access to birth control, access to illegal abortions, or they just stop having sex when they might get pregnant?

Right.

And all of this matters.

It matters for the families people can build.

You do see in Romania a lot of maternal mortality, people dying in pregnancy, and that's awful.

But what you don't see is the radical change in the size of the Romanian population that Tausescu might have hoped for.

So it sounds like antinatal or pro-natal policies like China, Romania, basically, is it safe to say they didn't have an effect that wasn't happening anyway in terms of declining population?

That's exactly right.

Both for Romania trying to cause birth rates to go up.

You mentioned China, who with their one-child policy was trying to cause birth rates to go down.

And yet when you look at China's birth rate over the decades of the one-child policy, it was falling about as fast as it was falling in other middle-income developing countries like India or Latin America or Chinese neighbors.

China probably ended up in a pretty similar place birth rate-wise to where it would have without the one-child policy, which just goes to show that governments don't have a lever that they can use to set the birth rate.

You hear the Federal Reserve Bank sets the interest rate or something like that.

There's no Federal Reserve Bank that can set the birth rate.

That's right.

You can set the interest rate for money, but you can't get your wife more interested in having more babies.

There's a hard line there.

So it's not feminism.

It's not government policy.

I'm going to assume it's not contraception because the birth rate's been falling since before that was mainstream and widely available.

And continuing to fall even in places where people all generally have contraception.

And you mentioned lack of religion or liberalism, and you point to India and you say, look, this is not a super liberal, super secular place, and they're having the same issues.

Or Latin America, right?

Yeah.

So there's just no grand theory that explains everything that could cause the population decline that we're seeing.

I think that's right.

I think it's something that a lot of societies are converging on for in a way that has been going on for a long time.

If you were looking for something big picture to say, you could say that probably a lot of parenting offers the same pleasures and rewards that it would have decades ago.

If my kiddo gets me up in the middle of the night because he's thrown up in his bed or something, I'm really glad that I have a washing machine that I can throw those sheets into right now.

And somebody wouldn't have had that maybe 75 years ago, might not have even had a second pair of sheets to change out or something.

Or maybe 200 years ago, they would have been in the same bed with me to begin with.

Like things are a little bit better.

But I'd say the costs and benefits of having a kid are probably pretty similar to that snuggle at the end is going to be similar to what it would have been.

But all these other things in life, whether for you that's education, whether for you that's work, whether for you, that's playing a video game or listening to podcasts or just sitting around in the air conditioning and not having a toothache, whatever it is that you value, it's probably a better alternative to compete with having kids than it would have been for for somebody 50 or 100 years ago.

And so it's just going to be a very big picture change in people's decision making.

And that means that any sort of response that's going to lead us to stabilizing the population instead of depopulating is going to also have to be a pretty big picture shift.

I keep thinking of countries where they do so much for parents.

I got a really close friend in Sweden and he's like, yeah, I get two months off, but then I get extra time because of this.

And he's not as much as my friends because I work at Apple instead of a state company.

I'm like, when are you at work ever?

And then other times it's like, yeah, no, I'm sending my son to this.

And I'm like, oh, it doesn't that get expensive.

No, it's totally free daycare, free day camp, free school, free this, free college.

So you don't have to pay for health insurance.

You get two months off or more, whatever it is, 10 weeks, I think, every year.

And you don't have any daycare expenses for your kid, but their birth rate is not increasing in Sweden or Scandinavia.

Right.

Oh, that's great.

And I would be excited to see that here.

And Sweden's at 1.4.

Yeah, one of the lowest in the West.

It's crazy to me.

So it's not affordability.

Clearly not what we're talking about here.

Right.

One of the things that we learned from examples of places like Sweden or Denmark at 1.5 or places where things are more subsidized, we see low birth rates.

And of course, we also see that comparing richer or poorer people within a country, within the United States or within Sweden, it's not like we see the richer people on average having these huge families with three or four children.

We do see that richer countries tend to have lower birth rates and that as time's gone on and places have become richer, birth rates have fallen.

Economists have studied young women who win the lottery and compare them with young women who played the lottery and maybe won a tiny prize or didn't win.

And you see that young women who win the lottery don't go on to have more children than young women who didn't.

And so there's a lot of evidence stacking up about the fact that it's not just money in the most direct or literal sense, not that money might not be able to help or be part of a package of solutions.

And not that children aren't, of course, expensive, but the evidence doesn't seem to suggest that just writing a check or government policy as usual is going to be what changes it.

No, it's just got to be other opportunity costs, career stuff, leisure time.

I want to move on to whether there'll be enough to go around.

I know this is a question people have been asking for generations, but if you look at the current economic situation, the housing crisis, it does kind of seem like there might not be enough resources if we add another 20%, 25%, whatever it is to the population over the next few centuries.

And I know we've always been talking about this.

People have always been like, there's not enough, what was it, tungsten or something?

That was a big deal.

And I was in high school.

We're going to run out of light bulbs.

And it's like, oh, come on.

Really?

There's no other way to make a light bulb.

And then, I don't know, five years later, it was like, you have to buy LEDs.

Now, there are lots of other ways to make light bulbs.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, and remember the rappy-tuby kind between that and LEDs.

I forget what those were called.

I literally don't even, I thought those were also, there's some kind of gas in there that gets excited by the electricity and that lights up.

It's on the tip of my tongue.

Right.

So we've had two types of light bulbs since we were kids is the point.

People come up with new things.

Now, I want to pause for a second about adding 20% to the population because I think one mistake that people sometimes make is to think that the alternative to increasing the population generation after generation.

and there's a third possibility, and that's the one that we're arguing for and after the spike, which is that the population stabilizes.

So, I don't know.

Oh, I see.

Just somewhere.

Exactly.

You know, the population's probably going to peak and begin to decline.

And so then the question is: do you want that decline to continue or should it stop somewhere?

And maybe somewhere importantly smaller than today, maybe 4 billion, maybe 3 billion.

I mean, asking exactly what size of the population we should seek, asking exactly how many doctors or nurses a society needs, it's beyond us to answer that question precisely.

Economists and sustainability studies couldn't answer it like that, but we know that it matters.

And so I don't think anybody knows the exact right number at which humanity should stabilize, but as long as you think it should stabilize at some level, even a level smaller than today, even 3 billion or 2 billion, instead of falling forever, then fundamentally you'd face the same challenge because at that time, you would need the birth rate to be about an average of two for the population to stabilize.

So for that to ever happen at any level, we'll need a birth rate of two.

That's a challenge that nobody knows the answer to.

And it's one that all of us face who want to avoid depopulation.

Okay.

Now back to light bulbs, man.

Like we're just back to light bulbs.

Is the strategy okay?

We'll just, we're going to innovate our way around these shortages because it was like oil, we're at peak oil.

It's copper, tungsten.

We've always innovated our way around these things.

We might innovate if there are other people to help us find the ideas and help us find the discoveries.

This is one of the reasons why depopulation matters and we should want to avoid it, that we're all made better off by sharing the world with other people alongside us, other people who are alive before us.

And that's because other people make the discoveries that we can use.

Let me give you an example of how ideas are a special type of renewable resource.

The most obvious examples of technology are rich countries at the technological frontier, inventing the next iPhone or something.

But high-tech is not the only tech.

Progress happens wherever people are solving problems.

And one of the most productive technologies ever conceived was invented in Bangladesh in the 1960s.

In my work on sanitation in developing countries, I once visited a hospital in Dhaka called ICDDRB.

And that hospital in practice, because it was in Bangladesh and Dhaka, focused a lot on cholera, on diarrheal disease.

And in fact, people there called it the cholera hospital.

And that's the place where doctors first mixed oral rehydration salts.

So Gatorade, basically?

Exactly.

Gatorade.

Okay.

So if you've got a kid who is suffering from bad diarrhea, they could truly die if they don't have the right mixture of salt and sugar dissolved in water to prevent them from dehydrating.

And it truly transformed humanity's ability to prevent children from dying of diarrhea.

So you're exactly right.

Today, we can just go to the store and get a bottle of Gatorade or get a bottle of Pedialite, or if you're living in Uttabrash, you can mix it in your own kitchen from sugar and salt and water, and it truly transforms humanity's ability to keep people alive.

So what's the point of the story?

What does this have to do with population?

So what it has to do with population is this.

When you drink that bottle of Gatorade, it's gone.

If you give your kid that bottle of Pedialite, it's gone.

No one else is going to ever drink that bottle again.

But the formula, the recipe, and even more important, the understanding that's a way to save lives continues undiminished.

And the economists who have figured out what's the ultimate driver of improving living standards, why people are less poor today, why society is safer and fairer and healthier today, have figured out that this is the key, the fact that ideas and knowledge have this property that they get used, but they don't get used up, and that the next generation can build upon them again.

And so if you have more people, it's not going to consume the true driver of economic progress, which is these ideas and knowledge.

Drinking more bottles of pedialite doesn't use it up.

But if we're on a path to depopulation and there aren't enough other people, then some of the discoveries that we could come up with won't happen.

And we won't be on the same path to an abundant future.

We won't be on the same path to eliminating poverty.

Yeah, what is that called when you have an innovation everyone can use non-rival?

Non-rival, exactly.

So in economics, a rival thing is something that if I use it, you can't.

If you take an antibiotic pill, I can't give that antibiotic pill to my kid.

But the formula for it or the germ theory of disease behind it continues undiminished.

Okay.

I want to go back to is there going to be enough and then dive back into innovation here.

What about food insecurity and human habitats?

Because we've got global warming or climate change making a lot of land uninhabitable over the next century or so, right?

So I'm hearing about, oh, these islands are going to be gone and these people have to go somewhere.

And so what about famines, for example?

I mean, yes, we got to find a place for people to live.

There's probably enough land, honestly, in a lot of different other areas.

So I don't want to address that.

But I know that we have food issues across the globe.

Even the Ukraine war was like, oh, my gosh, Africa is going to starve because the breadbasket of Europe is in war.

It's true that there are and have been places where there hasn't been enough food to go around, but generally that's not today in 2025 because there just simply isn't enough food in the world.

It's because the food isn't getting to that place and being made available for basically political reasons, like as you say, because of war.

For decades, people have been talking about overpopulation as a cause of famine.

When Paul Ehrlich published his book in 1968, The Population Bomb, he started it with the warning that there's nothing we can do now to avoid famine because the population is growing.

And soon some extraordinary number of people, he put, are going to starve to death every year.

But the thing is, that isn't what happened.

The population kept growing and we didn't all starve to death.

And in fact, there's more and better food available on every continent than there was at his time.

You can measure children in poor countries like India that children today are notably taller than children 10 years ago of the same age, who are notably taller than children 10 years before them would have been, because they have better food, better sanitation.

In fact, just the opposite is true.

Humanity's nutritional status has, on average, gone up over time as the population has gotten bigger.

And so why is that?

We're used to thinking of other people as eating our slice of the pie, or that population economics is a pie, and the more people eating it, the smaller the sliver that you're going to get.

But in fact, just the opposite is true because that idea misses the fact that somebody has to bake the pie in the first place.

Somebody has to make the thing.

And the critical economics idea there is fixed costs.

The fixed costs is the cost of anything happening at all, of your business being open, of your restaurant being open, of your podcast being produced, all right?

You make this podcast, and there's some cost, some challenge, some opportunity cost of making it at all.

But if one more person listens to it, that doesn't make it any more expensive to produce your podcast, right?

All of the costs of producing a podcast are the fixed costs of even making it in the first place.

So it's nothing but good for you if twice as many people or three times as many people listen to it, right?

Because it's not any more costly to produce it.

But if, on the other hand, there aren't enough people listening to it, then it might not generate enough revenue to satisfy the fixed cost of it existing in the first place.

That's the problem with most podcasts.

Yes, they go overboard on production and then they get a thousand listeners and it's like, oh, there's no ROI here.

Yeah, it's great for some schmo like me who sits around under a light with a microphone in front of him with half the time no pants on.

Of course, I'm fully clothed for this one, but sometimes just can't be bothered.

The costs are low.

I pay my team fairly and pay them above market rate, but that's because I can afford to do it.

Well, they're low, but but they're not zero.

And that's my point.

They're not zero, but you're right.

If I doubled the amount of people who listen to this, I literally force my network to absorb my variable costs anyways.

They pay for that.

And they're happy to because it means they got twice as much ad inventory to sell.

So yeah, this makes sense.

The restaurant example, I think, for a city makes sense, right?

You've got like down the street from me, there's an Ethiopian place.

There's a Korean place.

There's a Japanese place.

They're all in the same little shopping center.

That wouldn't have worked in the town that I grew up in because the demand for Ethiopian food, Japanese food, and Korean food together probably isn't enough to sustain one restaurant that had all three, let alone three restaurants that have each.

But here they're thriving.

Those places have been open for a long time and they're always full because there's a lot more people around here.

So, right, the fixed cost of having that around, as the population grows, we can have more things.

That's your argument, right?

I mean, it's things like restaurants, it's things like media, but it's also truly important things like niche medical treatments.

My mom, unfortunately, died of a rare form of cancer, a type of mucosal melanoma that only a few hundred people in the United States have ever had since the 70s, since they've been writing it down.

And basically, nobody really knew what to do about it because there aren't enough people who have had this for there to have been a good study of what to do or tried and tested protocols of how to respond to it.

And I'm not saying that it would have solved everything.

We don't want more people to have cancer, but you can see how if there aren't enough people who need the sort of medical treatment that you need, who need and want whatever it is you need and want, you're not going to get it.

So other people needing and wanting what you need and want is part of what makes it possible for you to get it.

A depopulating future is one where there's going to be less of you benefiting from other people wanting and needing what you want and need.

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Now, for the rest of my conversation with Dean Spears.

Medications is probably the most important one, but possibly slightly abstract.

I think another one that most people can relate to is phones.

They're probably not going to make the iPhone 16 for 100,000 customers.

It's just because each one would have to cost $100,000 and it's just that the market's not there for that.

Even 10 million people, they probably wouldn't make the iPhone 16.

I don't know how many people have buy iPhones every year.

It's a ton.

And they're innovating a little bit each time.

And it has to be a ton for it to be worth their while.

Right.

Otherwise, they would just make the iPhone.

We'd still be on the 3G or something like that.

And they'd go, this is the phone we have for now.

Until it stops working for everybody, we're not going to make another one because there's no point.

There's no point in figuring out how to make this smaller with a better camera because not enough people are going to buy it.

So yeah, it's not worth it to make iPhone 16 for that amount of people.

You want more people to do that.

And you do see specialized mobile phones, for example, poor people in a place like Uttar Pradesh, like optimized to not have to be charged very often or to what somebody there needs.

Because if enough millions of people will buy it, then it is worth the fixed cost of developing it.

Aaron Powell, endogenous economic growth, I think was the term you used in the book.

So more people generate more ideas.

Does that give places like China and India an advantage just due to sheer population size?

Or is it kind of like, well, it depends on how many STEM people you have, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, I mean, possibly, but I think part of the value of ideas is that they spread across borders.

And I'm not going to claim that happens perfectly.

Some of the most interesting research right now happening in endogenous technological progress is studying how, for example, when scientists move from Europe to the United States to be closer to their collaborators, you see them suddenly start getting more patents.

And, you know, that's the way that economists measure a scientific progress is more patents.

So all of which is to say international borders and where people are certainly matters.

But at the biggest picture, with this idea that more people cause more innovation and more technological progress.

What I want to suggest is that it doesn't exactly matter who you are or where you are.

It just happens because of what people are doing.

In the course of people's business, a nurse treating a new baby and a mom, giving them their standard lactation consulting advice to promote breastfeeding.

And then they have an idea like, hey, maybe if we tie the baby on to the mom this way, that's going to keep it warm and keep it safe.

And then that's a new idea that people can sew the same tie-on wrap and do it all over the world and save more lives.

And so it's not just the rare geniuses or luminaries working in one place.

It's not that ideas stay bottled up in the place where people come up with them.

It's something that gets widely shared.

Is your argument that depopulation will result in fewer ideas?

Depopulation will result in fewer ideas, fewer innovations and bouts of creativity.

Then we won't be making the same sort of progress towards higher living standards against new forms of cancer, against poverty that we otherwise would.

And it could be even worse than that.

It could be not just a missing out on progress, but we also need one another to curate and teach the ideas that we have.

Think of how much of society's GDP goes into teaching and organizing ideas.

both old-fashioned ways like universities, new ways like podcasts.

A lot of what we do is make ideas useful for one another.

And so it could be worse than merely not discovering ideas.

It could be that if there aren't enough other people to learn from and curate the ideas, then we actually lose some knowledge that could have been useful for us.

Won't AI make up for some of this?

It seems like AI will eventually be able to come up with tons of new ideas, spread things faster, make our systems more efficient.

It seems like AI could probably make up for some of this.

And I have other counter-arguments, but I'm curious what you think of the AI idea.

Maybe it's too hyped up.

Yeah, nobody knows exactly how productive AI is going to be.

You have economists who are optimistic, who think it might raise GDP by a number like 7%, or more skeptical ones like Deron Asimoglu, who thinks like 1%.

But what I want us to get away from is thinking that making up for a loss of people is good enough.

Because the progress that we have right now, the living standards we have right now, that's not good enough.

There's still a lot of poverty in the world.

And even for those of us who are more privileged, things could be better.

So what matters is, do we continue making the progress that we could make?

And are other people still going to be important to making that progress, even in a future with AI?

So I think the real question, is AI going to make people more productive?

So many technologies in the past have made people more productive.

So Daron Asimoglu, an economist in MIT, tells the story about the Industrial Revolution.

And one type of technology that came along was to spin wool and to making thread.

And once that technology came along, nobody ever did that work anymore.

That was a substitute for humans.

Humans went and did something else, presumably productive in the economy.

But another type of technology was the industrial factory itself.

or the water wheel driving an industrial factory.

And what that technology did is made humans more productive.

It was a complement to humans.

And so if AI is the sort of technology that makes humans more productive, which it seems very likely to be, so many other technologies, all the way from computers on the one hand to pencils on the other, have made humans more productive.

In fact, if AI makes humans more productive, then you care all the more about there being a larger population alongside with you, because it matters all the more that people could make more progress.

Okay.

Can't we just invest more in the people that we have?

I know the total number probably matters, but doesn't a thousand or a hundred thousand PhD AI STEM people out-compete one million ditch diggers?

Yes, we can and should invest more in the people that we have.

And over the next, say, six decades until the 2080s, while we're moving towards the population to peak, we should be.

That's not just investing more in education, but in the sort of early life health that helps people grow to their potential.

But what we're talking about here is one of the longest term challenges humanity faces and whether we want to be making longest term progress.

And so eventually we're going to get to a future where people have the health and nutrition they need at the start of life, people have the education they need at the start of life, and it matters how many of us there are.

You wrote in the book about how humans versus other mammals as a species kind of are different.

And I think we very much might kill ourselves via disasters and reproduction before we get to the depopulation thing.

We have to be the only species to figure out, one, health care, and two, how to limit our own fertility.

We've changed both our mortality rates and our fertility rates.

It used to be that maybe a quarter or more of children died in childhood.

And now, at least in places like Austin, Texas, that's a much tinier fraction.

And what other animal has managed to do then?

Similarly, what other animal would have lowered their birth rates from a number like six, 200 years ago to a global number like 2.3 now.

So it is a way that we're unlike other animals.

If the global birth rate does go below 2 and stay there, then there will only be so many humans ever born.

There have so far only been so many humans ever born.

Demographers estimate it that it's a number like 120 billion.

And so I don't have a crystal ball.

I don't know exactly where below two the global birth rate might go.

But if it goes anywhere below two, then we're going to end up with a number on the order of 30 billion future births ever happening.

And so 30 billion future births, 120 past births, that would mean that humanity is four-fifths over in the sense of four-fifths of birth already happening.

And that's something that you don't really see other animals deciding to do.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Are larger populations better able to withstand potential extinction?

I mean, it seems like that should be a given, right?

If we get hit by an asteroid and it kills 90% of the population, 10% remaining of 10 billion is more than 10% of 2 billion.

I don't know.

And another possibility is that deflecting an asteroid could be a challenge that you need to do it once and for all, right?

And so if one asteroid is coming and we need to send up one rocket ship to deflect it one time, then who's going to be more likely to succeed at that grand challenge?

humanity that has 5 billion people or humanity that has 5 million people?

Clearly, the 5 billion society is going to be more likely to build the rocket ship they need or overcome the challenges they need or simply have enough workers to make it happen.

So, absolutely, there are some grand challenges that have this fixed cost feature that a larger population would be more likely to succeed.

Yeah, what about carbon removal?

This is an interesting argument.

So, that number is fixed, right?

So, more people to remove the carbon in the future is less cost per person.

Exactly.

That's another example of this.

So, someday we're going to reach net zero carbon emissions and an extra person won't be putting more carbon into the atmosphere.

And so then what happens after that?

Hopefully what happens after that is negative emissions that we do intentional activities, planting forests, weathering to take the carbon out of the atmosphere.

But that's going to be costly.

It's going to require people to choose to do that instead of doing something else with their time and their money.

And so the more people there are at that time, the bigger the economy and the population, the cheaper per person it's going to be to decarbonize in the sense of negative carbonize and take carbon out of the atmosphere.

And this is one of those cases where we discovered this by accident, serendipitously.

We were taking the climate economy model that Bill Nordhaus used for his Nobel Prize winning work to think about what the optimal carbon tax should be.

We were using it to ask a different question, which is how does it matter whether we're on on a future path of depopulation or a path of population stabilization?

Does it make a difference?

And what we found to our surprise is that when we just did the simplest thing of plug the two population paths into the model, we found a slightly lower eventual long-term temperature in the larger population.

At first, we thought that must have been a mistake.

We sent our postdoc research scientist back into the code to figure out what we did wrong.

And the answer was this possibility of negative emissions or someday taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

That if there are more future people, they can do more of that.

Okay, so a bigger world is a better world.

Is that something that you support?

And I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but where does that bigger is better idea start to break?

Do we add 50 billion people to the Earth?

Maybe not.

Yeah, I think that would be way far outside of what we have science or experience to be able to say that 50 billion people would be better.

But But something like 50 billion people just isn't on the table.

It's outside possibility.

The size of the population is almost certainly going to peak and begin to decline.

Our practical question that we face is, do we want to start thinking about strategies to stop that decline, to stabilize the population somewhere?

And if so, where?

But 50 billion people, I don't think there's any sort of path that might get us there.

So if depopulation is global, are the Amish and the Mormons just going to inherit the earth?

They have a lot of kids.

That's a question we get a lot.

They have fewer kids than they used to.

The birth rate for Utah as a whole, where there are a lot of Mormons, is now below two.

The birth rate for Amish people is lower than it was a few decades ago.

And when I say something like the birth rate for Amish people is lower than it was a few decades ago, that doesn't count the people who left and stopped being Amish.

And so

when you have this question like, I've got this small group of people that has unusually high birth rates.

Are they going to take over the whole world?

The answer is probably not, because you would need their children to continue having high birth rates and their children to continue having high birth rates and for everyone to stay in the fold generation after generation.

Don't forget, the Catholics of Quebec and Canada in the mid-20th century had an extremely high birth rate.

Numbers like 9, 10, 11 children were not unheard of.

And today,

Quebec is on average below two so even though you have a subgroup with a really high birth rate doesn't mean it's going to stick yeah that makes sense come on mormons we're counting on you I guess I should speak to the Amish too but I'm I'm going to go ahead and guess a very small number of Amish people are listening to this podcast it's funny I said something about Amish people a while ago and I got a bunch of emails from Amish people I guess they do this Rumspringa where they can go join the world for a couple of years and they pick up podcasts.

Must be kind of slow out there in the beginning of your Roomspringa when you're downloading podcasts.

all right what about other concerns i should say about how to increase population government programs like free doesn't israel have free ivf so israel did make ivf free and so one question we sometimes get is

how much of this could be fixed with physical technology with just let's say artificial wombs for example that's a better question pretend i asked you that question instead yes i like you don't even have to have the pregnancy to have the baby and israel's example of of free IVF tells us something important because what actually happened when Israel did this is that you saw women getting married later and forming families later and starting to have kids later, because more of them felt, I'll be able to have one kid instead of zero kids.

And that's what matters.

People are less focused on being able to have two kids instead of one kids, for example.

And so if you feel like you've got it covered that you're going to be able to have one kid, maybe you just start your whole parenting part of your life later.

And so if IVF is suddenly freely available to you, then that's great.

That makes you better off.

But society as a whole might not see more people having children if they're just delaying having children because what's important to them is to have at least one.

But I mean, another question is how many people actually get to those ages

and want to have more children than they biologically can?

It's truly important for some people.

My own family, my spouse and I had three miscarriages.

It was terrible.

Statistically, in the population as a whole, we don't see that many people who are getting to their 40s and really wanting to have more kids.

No, you're right.

And also, man, supporting parents is actually hard and very expensive.

It's the child care, the health care, the education.

Solving these externalities requires collective action that we're just not really willing to take.

It's just sort of easier for a country to solve this on the national level by saying, come live here.

We have lower lower taxes, a higher standard of living, asterisk, better health care than where you're from, and you should come live here.

And then we get immigrants that are qualified to come and do certain kinds of work in our country, but that's at the cost of their own country, right?

I mean, the brain drain.

Right.

It's not going to work for the world as a whole.

Exactly.

So I see how this is sort of a game that's being played nationally.

It's quite interesting.

So the recommendation is stabilize.

What does that mean?

Population's not going up.

It's also not going down.

Do you have a theory on how how we do that?

Or is it just, yeah, this is somebody else's problem.

My book's about overpopulation.

I think it's everybody's problem.

Nice deflection.

I think right now, a lot of people still think that we're headed towards overpopulation.

Now, a lot of people still worry that there are going to be too many people.

And even if they don't think there are too many people, they would say, well, great, depopulation is something to welcome.

And so I don't think we can get too far ahead of that in this conversation.

We need to start from there and say, hey, let's think about whether depopulation is the future should welcome.

And if not, maybe let's work on building a consensus that stabilizing the population would be a better alternative.

So I think it's far too soon to be jumping to a policy prescription.

I mean, we've already seen it probably won't work.

But more importantly, if we're really going to

change what it is to be a parent, make parenting more feasible, make parenting more fair, if we're really going to share the work of making the next generation so that more people feel like they can fit parent again, that's going to be a big social change.

And it's not going to happen unless many of us think that it's a good idea and many of us think that depopulation is something to avoid.

So don't call your senator.

Instead, go talk to your buddy or your sister or something like that and say, what do you think about this?

Do you think depopulation is something to welcome?

A lot of my friends who are not planning to have kids, frankly, wonder why they should bring a child into a world that's full of wars and ecological disaster and lack of resources for some people.

But Steven Pinker was on the show and he explained that we're healthier, safer, and better educated than we ever have been in history.

If you spend a lot of time going to a place like Uttar Pradesh, India, you can truly see it.

There, economic growth and progress isn't just a statistic on a page.

It's children being more likely to survive.

It's children growing taller.

It's kids having shoes who wouldn't have had shoes 10 years ago.

The world, we have important setbacks and important challenges.

And the ones that we've talked about today, both climate change and child diarrhea are amongst them.

But that doesn't mean that a life today isn't better on average for the world as a whole than any life has ever been.

And so I do think that a life in the future is likely to be well worth living.

And that's one of the reasons that counts.

We've been talking about how other people's lives are good for you, that you benefit from them existing.

Part of the story is that other people's lives are good for them too.

And one of the things that we would lose in a depopulating future is that a lot of lives that could be really great wouldn't happen.

Yeah, I suppose that's the core of the theory here.

I used to think that it was just uncertainty that causes people not to have kids, but I guess it can't be that because people who live in poverty in another country have way more uncertainty than I do in Silicon Valley, and they have more kids than we do.

So it's very confusing.

It's really obvious that there are many causes to this, and you can't maybe even address each one, or at least it'd be very challenging to address each one individually i don't hold out a ton of hope that this is a problem that's going to get solved it's almost like the carbon thing where you go yeah we should definitely do something about that hopefully those other guys go first and oh i think we need a little elbow room around here i'm going to be dead before this is a real concern anyway and it's like well okay you have the natalists who are like i have to have 13 kids and you should have 13 kids too but for every one of those there's millions of people that are like no thank you they're too expensive and i'd rather play xbox at night than change diapers Yeah, I think when we talk about whether to be optimistic or pessimistic, I think the example of climate change is a good one in another way, too, which is that we're talking about a change that might unfold six decades from now.

And there was a time six decades ago when climate change was a change that was going to unfold decades in the future.

And six decades ago in the 1960s, people knew some big picture facts about climate change.

People knew that, not everybody knew, but some people knew that burning fossil fuels puts carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that's going to lead to warming.

And they wouldn't have known all the details, but they would have known there's going to be big problems.

And so scientists were collecting data on CO2 concentrations in the 60s.

Johnson gave a speech to Congress about pollutants, including carbon dioxide.

If you'd gone outside then, or if you'd gone on their equivalent of a podcast and said, hey, this is a big deal.

It's coming in a few decades.

And what we need to do right now is immediately get rid of everyone's internal combustion engines.

Then you would have sounded ridiculous in the the 1960s and nobody would have listened to your next sentence.

But

what actually happened with a lot of conflict and setbacks and grittiness is that people started doing the science.

People started doing the social science.

We developed journals like Nature, Climate Change, and social movements and political movements.

And it's not that everything's perfect now, but we're in a much better position six decades later today than we would have been if people hadn't been doing all of that work all along, even though they only knew some big picture things and not the answers.

So we only know some big picture things and not all the details.

But that gives me hope that if we get started talking about this and working towards something new now, a few decades from now, we might know a lot more than we do today.

This seems tough, man, because as I alluded to earlier, countries that are actually in a position to do something about this in many ways, like the United States, it's an easier lever to go, how do we make more immigrants come here?

How do we make it easier?

Or who can we blame?

Can we blame women?

Can we blame?

Who can we blame?

Yeah, we're already doing that part.

But we could say, all right, more H-1B visas.

All right, we're going to come up with a labor visa that's going to let people come in to work on farms and things like that or in restaurants, things that we are having trouble staffing.

It's sort of a problem that's really easy, relatively speaking, to solve versus trying to get people to have more kids here in the United States.

So I hate to say it, but it's essentially a problem where a country like the U.S.

can go, we can make this Central and South America's problem with the stroke of a pen.

Why would we try and solve it?

But I mean, not forever, right?

Because don't forget, Latin America is below two and Sub-Saharan Africa is still above two, but it's falling there too.

So it's just kicking the can down the road.

Eventually, the countries where migrants come from are going to have birth rates below two if they don't already.

And so it's only a delay, not a solution.

But man, you can really kick that can quite far.

You can delay for a long

time.

Because there's a world in which the entire continent of South America is essentially depopulated aside from the people that insist on staying.

You and I aren't going to see how this plays out six decades from now.

Exactly.

In a few centuries, it could just be, hey, people don't want to live in a place that is either flooded with ocean water or super, super hot and you can't grow anything.

And they just all move to air-conditioned Europe and the U.S.

And so those countries are okay because they've got their population is stable, but every other country that was on the bottom of that ladder just is extinct now.

You can go to Guatemala.

It's a giant national park.

There's nobody there.

Something like that.

That's not impossible either.

And it's almost easier for that to happen, in my imagination, than it is to solve this problem in the United States with some sort of magical set of policies.

It's fun to think about, maybe I'm glad I'll be dead by the time this is a real problem.

Maybe that's the real good news at the end of this podcast is every one of you listening to this is probably going to be underground by the time this is actually an issue.

I don't know.

You don't think you have teenager listeners?

Yeah, they're going to be 90 or 100 and they'll be like, oh, yeah, there's not enough people.

Oh, well, let's play Mahjong again.

Teenagers are, I'm going to go ahead and go out on a limb and say they are not super worried about what's going to happen in 60 years.

Because when I was a teenager, that really wasn't on my radar either.

Dean, thank you for coming on.

Unique viewpoint on this, I think.

Most people, myself included, before hearing this, really was like, we need less people, not more.

Thank you so much for having me.

I just want to say, I think that was the most fun one of these I've done yet.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

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I don't know, man.

I like to listen to experts, but for some reason, all that extra elbow room and all that less pollution on earth, it does seem like a good idea.

Now, I am afraid that ideas would slow down, but I'm also thinking that AI and technology could make up for some of this.

Again, I have done zero research on this aside from reading this book, so listen to experts.

I wonder what you all think of this.

I'm curious what other experts and what you, listeners, who are quite educated as a bunch, think about this as well.

All things Dean Spears will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

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