Are We Running Out of People?

(Review of After the Spike by Dean Spears and Mike Geruso)

APPENDIX

Spears and Geruso’s philosophical point of departure is “effective altruism.”
What is it?

While Dean Spears and Mike Geruso, the authors of the book After the Spike, are mainstream economists, their close association with the effective altruism (EA) movement is worth noting. (Spears describes himself as an “economic demographer and development economist,” and Geruso is an authority on health insurance and global demography.) EA is a well-intentioned but controversial philosophy that asks us to use “reason and evidence” (rather than emotion) to do good. It appears to have originated with the Australian philosopher Peter Singer at Oxford University in the 1970s.

EA has recently become popular with the tech crowd, and (surprise!) has taken on some kooky aspects, making extraordinary financial and practical demands on its most passionate adherents. Unfortunately the crooked entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried embraced EA, casting a pall on the whole idea.