Why The 'Case Against People' Falls Short And Depopulation May Be The Next Global Risk
As fertility rates fall worldwide, the authors argue that depopulation, not overpopulation, now poses the greater long-term danger.
A rapid decline in human numbers would shrink markets, weaken innovation, and quietly erode the foundations of modern economic and social progress.
After The Spike: The Risks of Global Depopulation and the Case for People. Dean Spears and Michael Deruso. Penguin Allen Lane. Pages: 336. Price: Rs 608.
A decade ago, India’s public discourse was dominated by fears of a population explosion. Today, that anxiety has reversed, replaced by worries over plunging fertility rates and the looming prospect of depopulation. India’s policymakers, such as Shamika Ravi, have explicitly mentioned these risks and how they will affect our shared future.
After The Spike: The Risks of Global Depopulation and the Case for People is an important book that reframes this discourse to make a case for population stabilisation in the future.
The authors, Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, both economists and demographers, work as associate professors at the University of Texas at Austin. Geruso has also served as a senior economist in the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Biden, advising on population change. The background of the authors makes the book a deft intersection of demography, economics, and policy insight.
Divided into four parts, the book discusses in detail the population spike we are witnessing now and how we reached this point, the case against people and the rebuttal to it, and policy advocacy for the path ahead. The authors call today’s eight-billion-strong humanity ‘the Spike’, the temporary peak before numbers begin to fall.
The highest number of children were born in 2012, and since then the world has continuously seen a decline in the number of children born. We are therefore living at ‘the Spike’, when the human population is at its maximum.
After the Spike, they argue, there are two possibilities: depopulation, in which the population will decline rapidly, or stabilisation, in which population levels will hold steady. Demographic forecasts differ on which path we will take. Yet the relentless fall in fertility worldwide makes depopulation the more likely trajectory.
Why, then, do some people still advocate depopulation? The reasons they offer are multiple, but chiefly that children have a carbon footprint and contribute to climate change; that the world has become too cruel to raise children, as a greater population will intensify fights over resources; and that the economics of having children no longer add up.
Spears and Geruso take each argument head-on and systematically dismantle it. The carbon footprint per head, they argue, has more to do with technological innovation and less with population size. They present two examples, one of stabilisation and one of depopulation, to illustrate how small the difference in climate change outcomes is due to population levels, and how large the difference is due to technological advancement.
The authors make a compelling economic and scientific case for the progress made over the last two centuries that has improved human lives. Thus, the reasoning that the world has become a worse place in which to raise children does not hold.
Innovation thrives when societies have enough people to generate ideas, test them, and build cumulatively on past work. Take the electric bulb. Thomas Edison, popularly credited with inventing the electric bulb in 1879, did not start from scratch. The process had been ongoing since the early 1800s. With a smaller population, the number of people working on innovation and the size of the addressable market would shrink, making innovation increasingly difficult.
Similarly, while resources are limited across the globe, this cannot be offered as a justified excuse for depopulation. Innovation, the authors argue, can address resource scarcity.
Yet not all their claims are fully persuasive. Their reading of India’s fertility data, for instance, glosses over the fact that Muslim fertility remains above replacement level even as the gap narrows. The picture in India is more complicated. It is true that the total fertility rate (TFR) among Muslims is declining, but it still remains above the replacement level.
For non-Muslim communities such as Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Christians, the TFR has fallen below replacement level. According to the Indian National Family Health Survey (2019–21), the TFR for Muslims is still 2.36, whereas for others it is below 2.1, which is considered the replacement level. Anxiety over demographic imbalance, therefore, cannot be dismissed outright.
The solutions to avoid depopulation, and whether a declining TFR can correct itself naturally, are questions that lack definitive answers. Fixing the TFR and stabilising the population should not be antithetical to women’s rights and reproductive freedom.
Instead, the authors advocate making parenthood easier and more accessible through policies that support caregivers and families.
The book’s message is clear. A shrinking world will be a smaller one, in ideas, in innovation, and in opportunities. Depopulation will not save the climate in the immediate term, but it may quietly undo the very engines of progress that made modern life possible.
Spears and Geruso may not have all the answers, but they ask the right and uncomfortable questions. In a century defined by falling birth rates, that is where any honest debate must begin.