Children are precious and valued as human beings, regardless of where their careers lead them.
T he case for natalism should be easy to make, but it tends to land on deaf ears. Accepting a declining population is ingrained in the culture because having more babies feels at odds with a cleaner environment, social progress, and a better world. It’s common to blame children for society’s ills, instead of having optimism for what children may achieve, or what their world will look like. Even with birth rates in the United States hitting another historic low in July, few real conversations are being had to try and reverse the decline in fertility.
Although the Trump administration and other policy-makers have committed to raising birth rates, their approach is based entirely on subsidizing parenthood through programs like baby bonuses and child tax credits. This misses the real reason that birth rates have fallen: Small families or being child-free entirely have been considered social goods for decades. A $5,000 baby bonus or a $1,000 “Trump Account” can’t unpack years of social conditioning to be anti-children and anti-people.
The campaign against people has taken different forms; more births supposedly means more greenhouse-gas emissions, or greater gender inequity. While largely debunked, ideas like the “Malthusian apocalypse” and the Population Bomb persist in how people talk about reproduction today. This anti-people ethos of the past five decades has driven the U.S. to the brink of depopulation, coming from families choosing to have one to two children — working out to 1.6 children per pair of adults.
Advocates for higher population growth are usually discredited as anti-woman, anti-environment, and anti-progress. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. In After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, economics professors Dean Spears and Michael Geruso push back against the idea that wanting more people means opposing progress. They instead argue that people are what makes progress possible.
The book makes three big claims. The first is that no future is more likely than population decline. The second is that a stabilized world population is preferable to a depopulating future. The third is that nobody knows how to stabilize the population, but historical evidence shows that depopulation is a solvable problem, if we try.
If birth rates stay on their current path, the global population will shrink every decade. Within three hundred years, a peak population of 10 billion could fall below 2 billion. This is not an unlikely outcome, since two-thirds of the world’s population live in a country with birth rates that are too low to sustain their populations. This shift in family life will profoundly shape our future, but can easily slip past our notice. Depopulation will occur because people around the world choosing to have small families — not smaller than the average, but small like the average. These individual choices adding up to birth rates of 1.4, 1.6, or 1.8 per woman all mean a depopulating future.
Despite the anti-people campaign to convince us otherwise, there is no evidence that having more babies precludes progress towards a better environment, more equality between the genders, or the creation of a better world. For example, the global population has been growing for centuries, while many environmental concerns have been addressed and even eradicated. The authors cite acid rain; while they were taught about acid rain in school, their children will never hear about it because it is a solved problem. There is no fixed relationship between population size and air pollution. Data show that younger generations are more environmentally sustainable than their grandparents. This is because of the ingenuity young people who find better ways to use resources with a smaller environmental impact. Fewer people doesn’t mean a lower risk of environmental harm, it may in fact mean the opposite.
There is also no reason to believe that returning to birth rates above 2.1 will facilitate societal regression, in part because a stabilized future is an idea-generating economy. The worlds that anti-natalists Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich wrote in were much worse in terms of living conditions than what we occupy today. Spears and Garuso talk about the over-the-counter painkiller Naproxen. In 1986, when Ehrlich was on television warning of overpopulation, Naproxen was not available at any price. Today, one pill costs only four cents. For an average worker making $35 an hour, one naproxen pill is less than five seconds of work. A wonder drug for musculoskeletal pain and medicine cabinet staple was still in development less than 60 years ago.
The authors are clear: Depopulation will not fix itself because there is no dormant natural force that is waiting to stabilize the global population. Religious groups are having fewer children, and despite claims, the Amish will not populate the earth. Fertility technologies like egg-freezing can only do so much to palliate birth rate declines. Indeed, we live in a world with advanced fertility technology and low birth rates.
Spears and Geruso are right to try and dispel the myths that a larger population requires environmental harm and social regression. The anti-child myths that prioritize individualism have taken hold of American politics, and the way people think about the value of children. More importantly, the authors also make an empirical case that is both pro-family and pro-growth, the latter of which has been ignored in much pro-natal discourse.
Although After the Spike provides a strong case for population stabilization, it is unlikely that it will have a strong impact on policy or popular discussions. Much of the pro-natal discourse focuses on technocratic solutions to declining fertility with little attention for the true goodness of humans. It is more politically popular to endorse monetary “baby bonuses” than it is to have hard discussions about why parenting is so unpopular. We have to acknowledge that it is difficult to make the choice to have children when your community has openly decried having children.
As the authors rightly point out, the problem is that the opportunity cost of having children has risen — not that children have become more expensive. As alternatives have improved, choosing children has become harder. The world is becoming a better place, which in turn makes it harder to choose children. Having children is one way to build a good life, but so are many attractive alternatives that are more available than they once were.
Making parenthood more appealing through sound policy, strong communities, and technological changes is the authors’ answer for overcoming these opportunity costs. This is all fine and good, but requires a much more drastic cultural change than the authors seem to imply. Yes, people matter. And yes, a depopulating world is a worse world. But how can we convince a culture fed anti-people rhetoric to change its mind?
One important dimension Spears and Geruso largely overlook is the role of religion in sustaining pro-family values. Across traditions — be it Christianity, Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, or others — religious communities tend to hold people in higher esteem, see children as blessings instead of burdens, and offer robust social support for parents. These cultural and spiritual norms often encourage marriage and larger families in ways secular society does not. Accordingly, the average fertility rate for religious people attending services weekly persists above 2.0.
The central claim of Spears and Geruso’s book is that more people can prevent unfavorable societal changes, as opposed to accelerating decline, by imagining a world filled with potential. People are a good to be maximized, not a burden to be avoided, and this should be shouted from the rooftops. But even the most unremarkable children who grow into average adults are still worth celebrating. Children are precious and valued as human beings, regardless of where their careers lead them.
The power of population growth is innovation in all forms. While many advocates of population growth tend to focus on ideas of grandeur, small ideas still matter for giving us a taste of “the good life.” The neighbor who plants fragrant flowers, the school teacher who discovers a way to make it easier to recruit volunteers, the friend who hosts a party on a random weekend. Fewer people means fewer opportunities to enrich our lives.