Running Out of People

Since Donald Trump regained the White House, news consumers have been inundated with stories about “pronatalism”—the ideology and movement gaining ground on the right that views falling birth rates as an existential crisis and encourages families to have more children. Trump has called himself the “fertilization president”; his ex-henchman Elon Musk has 14 children (give or take); and Vice President J. D. Vance has called for more children to be born and derided childless women. Because some of the movement’s loudest and most-covered champions are staunch conservatives with clear, if only sometimes overtly stated, ambitions to restore traditional gender roles, or even advance eugenics, many progressives’ initial reaction has been to consider the movement creepy and distasteful. Others have expressed concern that it will lead to the walking back of women’s rights. Yet a current of curiosity has crept into left-of-center media as people wrestle with what dramatic depopulation would really mean for standards of living across the globe. Vox published a story on pronatalism in May with the subtitle “Don’t let polarization distract you from one of the most important issues the world faces.” A month later, The New York Times ran a feature on the subject, “The Feminist Case for Spending Billions to Boost the Birthrate.” 

A new entry into this conversation is Dean Spears and Michael Geruso’s After the Spike. Spears and Geruso, both economists at the University of Texas at Austin, make the case that we should all be concerned about population decline as an existential threat. They contrast “two futures”: one in which global population peaks at 10 billion about 60 years from now and then stabilizes; and another in which it begins to fall, shrinking to 2 billion—the same as in 1927—within the next three centuries. Unless something changes, the authors contend, the second scenario is more likely. In such a world, they warn, standards of living will stagnate; fewer people means fewer innovations to improve our quality of life, from music to coffee to vaccines. More gravely, they claim, less innovation and fewer resources would cripple humanity’s ability to tackle major challenges, whether developing climate solutions or deflecting an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.

Spears and Geruso’s second scenario can sound alarmist. The first two chapters of their book lay out widely acknowledged facts. The birth rate is already below replacement rate in more countries than not. Further, as countries get richer, their birth rates go down; population decline will not be contained to currently wealthy, whiter countries. Nonetheless, not everyone sees this leading to catastrophe. The UN, for example, agrees that there is an 80 percent chance that the world population will peak in this century, but predicts that the peak will be followed by a “gradual decline,” not a crash.

Still, quibbling about the speed of population decline risks missing Spears and Geruso’s central point: Concern about shrinking numbers need not imply conservative views on gender roles, reproductive freedom, or indifference to climate change. (Geruso, after all, served on Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.) They know that persuading progressives is an uphill climb, which is why, after establishing the demographic facts, they immediately turn to dismantling the case against population growth. This early section, “The Case Against People,” tackles fears that more humans would worsen climate change, undermine women’s equality, or simply condemn children to suffering. The following section, “The Case for People,” flips the script: More people, the authors argue, means more creativity and innovation, and thus a greater capacity to solve problems large and small. They also advance an ethical claim: Future people “have a stake that counts,” and we should believe that they want to exist and that their lives will “have value.” The book ends by dismissing the usual policy levers—cash incentives and coercion—as either ineffective or immoral, and calls for new thinking on how to avert a demographic collapse. 

Spears and Geruso’s choice to rebut their critics before making their own case is unusual but effective. Their climate chapter, in particular, forces readers to confront a basic reality: The timelines for climate change and population decline don’t match. Barring something drastic, the global population will keep rising for the next 50-some years—well past the deadline for cutting emissions to avoid the worst climate scenarios. Depopulation half a century from now will not save us.

A chapter titled “Population Starts in Other People’s Bodies”—true enough, though a little glib coming from two men—argues that fertility need not decline further for gender equality to advance. A fertility rate around two, they contend, is compatible with women’s equity. They note that among countries with rates between one and two, the gender pay gap shows no correlation with birth rates. And in the U.S., from 1975 to 2010, when fertility stagnated, the pay gap narrowed significantly. Their conclusion is that stabilization and feminism can coexist—if men simply help more at home. “The clearest reason why stabilization need not be bad for women,” they write, “is that men could and should do more parenting and housework, across the many years it takes to raise a child.” But optimism alone won’t get men to change their behavior. What’s missing is policy to push them toward it.

Leaning on optimism is the through line of the book. “Progress happens wherever people are solving problems,” Spears and Geruso write, and they take this faith to its limit. The existence of more people, in their view, means more ideas, more discoveries, more resources. Depopulation, then, would be disastrous, choking off the innovations needed to tackle “fixed-cost” threats like climate change (or a killer asteroid). Their belief that sheer numbers will generate solutions to humanity’s gravest challenges is far more convincing than their suggestion that numbers alone  will mean that future men will cook dinner for their family. Men have begun to do more unpaid care work over the past few decades, but significant disparities remain stubbornly sticky. Women with children under six, for example, spend a third more time on child care each day than their male counterparts. While innovation has made it easier to recycle and drive an electric car, it has not made it easier to leave work in the middle of the day and pick up your sick kid from school. We need policy solutions that help turn optimism into reality.

Spears and Geruso have little to suggest. They can tell us with certainty that governments’ efforts at addressing population decline (or population growth) have never significantly moved the needle. Plans for government control aren’t just immoral, they’re also failures. The authors write, “Attempting to force fertility has influenced birth rates, especially over the short term, but has never actually had enough power and leverage to shove the world on or off the path of depopulation.” Likewise, the solution often promoted by progressives dabbling in natalism—public spending to make parenting easier—hasn’t seemed able to reverse the general trend. Denmark and Sweden, for example, both spend double what the U.S. does relative to GDP on family benefits and still have lower birth rates. Notably, the Trump administration’s proposals so far include small gestures at money and larger moves to limit reproductive choice, including reserving scholarships for people who are married or have children, “baby bonus” grants to new mothers, and restrictions on abortion paired with government education programs focused on fertility. Spears and Geruso would say none of these are likely to work. 

While the authors are clear that they are short on solutions, they do advance an interesting theory about the decline in global population: opportunity cost. People often claim they aren’t having as many children as they want to because they can’t afford them. This is a tempting explanation, especially in the U.S., where the cost of child care is too expensive for many families. Spears and Geruso, however, show that the decline in birth rates holds across states even as the cost of children—child care, housing, and so on—varies significantly. Why, then, are people telling us that kids are too expensive? The authors argue that they are saying that they have to give up too much to have children—not just money, but opportunities. As our choices about how to spend our time and make money and meaning in our lives have expanded, the opportunity cost of having a child has gone up. “A better world with better options makes parenting worse by comparison,” Spears and Geruso write.

If we are going to answer the authors’ call to find policy solutions, looking for ways to make parenting a better option seems like a good place to start. Money can help, but it’s insufficient; time is necessary, too. How do we make it easier for parents to leave work when their kid is sick without fearing the loss of either their next paycheck or essential opportunities? How do we support parents so they don’t have to choose between delaying having children and having a career? How do we get men to do more work at home? 

That final question is not just about feminist principles. Recent research from the Nobel Prize–winning economist Claudia Goldin suggests that more equitable distributions of caregiving within families might be essential to increasing fertility rates. Goldin found that the countries with the lowest fertility rates are ones that experienced the most rapid GNP growth. Opportunities opened up for women, but men’s attitudes had not shifted, and they remained unwilling to increase their share of housework and care duties. The ensuing conflicts—extreme versions of the stubborn gender disparities in the U.S.—led to a sharp decline in birth rates. The division of work at home appears to be significant to people’s fertility choices. 

These insights point toward a progressive agenda the book itself only gestures at: lowering the opportunity cost of children by giving parents more time. This means policies that let people leave and reenter the workforce more easily, that redesign careers so advancement doesn’t hinge on never stepping away, and that actively push for more equal divisions of care. Research needs to be done on what this kind of agenda could look like in the U.S. 

There are international models, among them Tokyo’s four-day workweek for municipal employees, and Iceland’s near-universal 36-hour week and its parental leave policy that assigns equal time (six months) to each parent. It is too early to know if Japan’s plan, rolled out this spring, will raise birth rates, as it is intended to do. Early studies from Iceland show not just happier families but also men spending significantly more time on child care and housework. And Iceland’s birth rate, while still below two, has remained higher than the rate in other Nordic countries.

Just as we should be using international comparisons of workweek and leave policies to learn about reducing opportunity costs by redistributing time, we can also compare the experience of different career paths to lead us to policy solutions. More than a century of gendered job segregation has also meant that careers traditionally dominated by women have developed career paths where the opportunity cost of children is lower. Take, for example, teaching and nursing, the two most common occupations for women today. Both typically require post-secondary degrees, but the training and the job itself are significantly different from advanced-degree career paths historically dominated by men. These jobs include more flexibility about when to enter training, how schedules align with caregiving, and how to step in and out of the workforce. There is surprisingly little research comparing fertility rates across specific professions in the U.S. (although there is quite a bit on how fertility correlates to education levels), but one preliminary analysis suggests that rates may be higher in certain woman-dominated professions. More rigorous research on this subject could help us understand if adaptations that originally grew out of gendered inequality now offer models for reducing opportunity costs of having children across professions.

Spears and Geruso compare themselves to the “climate pioneers of the 1950s.” While they believe we are near the peak of the population spike, they know we are at the beginning of building the body of research to support stabilization. Whether or not you accept their unique blend of alarmism and optimism, it’s clear that the opportunity cost of children is currently too high. Research to support stabilization is a worthy cause, because we should all want a world where children are seen as an opportunity, not a cost.