As a member of the 8.23 billion-strong human community, you probably have an opinion on the fact that the global population is set to hit a record high of 10 billion within the next few decades. Chances are, you’re not thrilled about it, given that anthropogenic climate change is already battering us and your morning commute is like being in a hot, jiggling sardine-tin.
Yet according to Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, academics at the University of Texas, what we really need to be worried about is depopulation. The number of children being born has been declining worldwide for a couple of hundred years. More than half of countries, including India, the most populous nation in the world, now have birthrates below replacement levels. While overall population has been rising due to declining (mainly infant) mortality, we’ll hit a peak soon before falling precipitously. This apex and the rollercoaster drop that follows it is the eponymous “spike”.
Most people’s lives today are better than they ever were in human history, thanks to the progress, prosperity and brilliant ideas that have come with all those people. The more of us there are, the more human ingenuity there is – “the ultimate renewable resource”. Spears and Geruso argue that future people who live alongside only a couple of billion others will have significantly worse lives than we have today. Stabilisation, not depopulation, they argue, is the right path for humanity. For that to happen, we need to be having more babies.
After the Spike knocks down assumptions like skittles. Population fearmongers from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich are refuted, and evidence laid out to show what worldwide fertility is not linked to: changes in wealth, the invention of contraception or women’s rights. Nor can government policies that force people to have, or not have, children do much to change long-term trends. This is as true for China’s one-child policy as it is for Ceaușescu’s banning of abortion in Romania, which only had short-term effects. Even when non-coercive governments support parents with childcare and comparatively generous parental leave, as in Sweden, these policies have not shifted the needle. Sweden will start to shrink in 2051.
The strongest commonsense belief the authors tackle is the idea that lower birthrates are a good thing because the planet is burning and more people means worse climate change. In fact, climate change is such an urgent issue that depopulation will kick in far too late to make any serious impact. Not only that, but the difference between the contribution to climate change made by the current population versus the population at the top of the spike is not significant. Depopulation won’t help the climate, then, but it will mean that there are far fewer of us left to deal with part two of cleaning up humanity’s mess on Earth: removing excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Creating a good life – whether that’s finding cures for disease or ways to reverse environmental damage – relies on the ideas, work and progress produced by large, interconnected societies.
Why, then, are we increasingly choosing to have fewer children? The answer is likely to be a combination of cultural, biological, economic and social factors, but the best unifying theory in After the Spike is to be found in a satirical headline from the Onion: “Study Finds American Women Delaying Motherhood Because the Whole Thing Blows”. As life on Earth has come to offer more and more rich and interesting options for how to spend our time, the opportunity cost of parenting has become increasingly less attractive. There are now more ways to make a meaningful life with fewer or no kids, even if you did want them, as gen Z is well aware.
If we agree that we ought to make life good for our descendants, and that this means supporting a stable, sizeable human population, how can we achieve this? The solution proposed by Spears and Geruso is no less than a total restructuring of society around care, in which parenting is so well supported socially, culturally, economically and medically that it is seen as a joy, not a relentless struggle. Were this to have been my reality a decade ago, I might have had the football team of tumbling, laughing babies I sometimes feel a pang for. Whether humanity can achieve anything like it in time to avert depopulation seems doubtful, but if there’s one thing After the Spike leaves us with, it’s the impulse to back ourselves.
• After the Spike: The Risks of Global Depopulation and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso is published by Bodley Head (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
