Depopulation can be a taboo topic, but it is one we should start thinking about.
The chart that opens the essay we're featuring here today — illustrating what the global population might look like over time — was the first thing that convinced me we should ask the economist Dean Spears to write for us. The second was Dean Spears himself. |
His work, done alongside his longtime collaborator Michael Geruso, looks at a phenomenon that I had long thought about but never seriously considered: What happens if birthrates continue to drop? The best current projections estimate a peak global population sometime soon — within the lifetimes of children alive today. But few researchers have looked much further than that. |
Dean's work gives us a glimpse into what could happen after that point. |
More than that, it offers us a thoughtful examination of how we should approach this uncertain future. Depopulation is a fraught topic. So much of society is built on the implicit assumption that our population is ever-growing. It's easy to begin vilifying anyone who chooses not to have children, or even to justify reversing abortion rights as some kind of nationalistic good. I worried that even touching the topic would be too difficult. |
But Dean was relentlessly considerate in his writing. He insisted that we could grapple with two realities at once: that declining birthrates are a potentially serious challenge that we don't yet know how to tackle, and that we can also find a way to do just that. |
The resulting piece taught me a lot about just how intractable low birthrates are. Once they dip below about two children per woman, they generally don't come back up. It also taught me how to start having a conversation about this sensitive, even taboo, topic. I encourage you to read the full piece to understand exactly what we might be facing in the not-so-distant future. It may be more of a shift than you think. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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