In my 2019 book, Fewer, Richer, Greener, I wrote:
- I [had] read Ben Wattenberg’s book, Fewer, his elegy for the population explosion. Showing that the explosion was effectively finished in the developed world and quickly coming to an end in the rest of the world, Wattenberg wrote in funereal tones, lamenting the end of an age of youth, exuberance, and innovation.
- I thought it was the best news I had ever heard.
Maybe I was wrong.
It’s still true that no physical quantity, including the human population, can grow at a positive rate forever — so population growth has to stop sometime. But any very rapid change, including the population-explosion sudden stop that we seem to be experiencing, can pose problems. In an interesting but problematic new book, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, two economists, Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, warn that the switch to a population implosion, currently underway, could have catastrophic consequences for human well-being and even survival.
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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.
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