Dean Spears: After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
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Event details
Author: Dean Spears (Texas)
Abstract: This talk will be based on the new book After the Spike. 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 explain why global depopulation is coming, why it matters, and what to ask 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, making parenting better, and stabilizing our numbers. In this academic talk, Spears will go in-depth into two core pieces of evidence: (1) why cohort completed fertility data suggest that future low birth rates are likely, specifically because of a decomposition into childlessness and the average number of children per parent, and (2) the effect of population change on climate change in Nordhaus’ DICE models and other, and the importance of the speed and timing of population change.
Host: James Choy (York)
Cluster: AME