Dean Spears & Michael Geruso on Why We Need More People

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk Episode Title: Dean Spears & Michael Geruso on Why We Need More People
Date: July 5, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Yascha Mounk hosts economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso (writing as Michael Dean) to discuss their provocative thesis: the biggest demographic threat of the next century isn’t overpopulation, but underpopulation—falling fertility rates leading to global depopulation. The conversation covers why previous fears of a “population bomb” were misplaced, the surprising new realities of global fertility, why shrinking populations pose unique economic and societal risks, and the philosophical case for valuing more people. The trio rigorously interrogates the empirical evidence, explores common climate and resource arguments, and challenges zero-sum thinking about human presence on Earth.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. From Overpopulation Panic to Underpopulation Reality

(03:18–05:55)

• Historical overpopulation fears: From Malthus to Paul Ehrlich's influential 1968 book The Population Bomb, influential thinkers warned of starvation and resource depletion due to growing populations.
• Dean Spears’ critique: Ehrlich and others were “wrong on their values and wrong on the facts.” The world is now heading toward global depopulation—where each decade will see fewer people than the last ([04:09], Michael Dean).
• Fertility below replacement: Today, most countries—including not just Italy or Japan but India, Mexico, and Iran—have fertility below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.

Notable Quote

“Ehrlich missed that depopulation was coming... Depopulation won’t solve climate change or reduce global poverty or make the world fairer. In fact, we stand to lose something important, because people are a core ingredient in scientific and social progress.”
— Michael Dean [04:09]

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2. Is Global Depopulation Really Happening?

(05:55–17:18)

• Intuition vs. data: Even as global population has quadrupled since 1925, birth rates have been steadily falling everywhere that keeps good statistics ([06:37], Yasha Monk).
• Why? Decline in mortality, not sharp rise in births, drove population growth. The global trend now is universal: as countries become more affluent and educate more women, fertility falls.
• Not just rich countries: India, Latin America, and Iran now have rates below replacement. Sub-Saharan Africa is the main exception, but trends suggest even there, the decline is inevitable—closely linked to female education and economic development ([10:42], Michael Dean).
• Population momentum: Due to past high birth rates and current age structure, population continues to rise for now even with fewer births—but this will reverse rapidly as cohorts age ([17:18], Michael Dean).

Notable Quote

“The whole time that the population has been growing... birth rates have been falling. And today, in two-thirds of the countries on Earth, birth rates are too low to sustain populations over time.”
— Yasha Monk [06:37]

Notable Quote

“Sub-Saharan Africa right now has low levels of female education... If, as education and socioeconomic development come to sub-Saharan Africa, we don’t see birth rates falling, that would be a real break with global history.”
— Michael Dean [10:42]

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3. Why Would Depopulation Be a Problem?

(23:28–30:44)

The Environmental Argument

• Common claim: Fewer people means less pollution and lower carbon emissions.
• Counterpoint: Historical data undermines this; for instance, despite China’s population growing by 50 million from 2013–2023, air pollution halved due to technological and regulatory change. Similarly, Britain would have to reduce carbon by much more than a mere population drop could ever achieve.
• True solution: Directly targeting pollutants and emissions, not reducing population, is what drives environmental progress.

Notable Quote

“When people think about population and big environmental problems like climate change, they make the error of thinking the solution is fewer people, not changing activity. But that’s never been the way environmental progress has been made.”
— Michael Dean [27:24]

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The Economic and Societal Argument

• Innovation and prosperity: The growth of knowledge, discoveries, and economic dynamism is fundamentally a collective, cumulative process. Fewer people mean less collaboration and slower progress.
• Aging societies: Shrinking, aging populations create fiscal pressures—more retirees relative to workers, more healthcare/pension costs—and less societal flexibility to adapt or invest in the future.
• Endogenous growth: As formalized by economist Paul Romer, knowledge and innovation are “non-rival” goods—new people make everyone better off, not worse.

Notable Quote

“Other people make the discoveries and have the ideas that improve our lives. So without other people in a depopulating future, we wouldn’t continue to make so much progress and we’d be worse off, each of us, per person.”
— Michael Dean [30:44]

• Specialization problem: Modern innovation often requires large, diverse, highly specialized teams. Progress can no longer rely on lone geniuses; it needs a critical mass ([36:52], Yasha Monk).

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4. Philosophical Dimensions: Does the Number of People Matter?

(41:19–54:48)

• Value of potential lives: Should we prefer a world with more thriving lives to a world with fewer, all else equal?
• Zero-sum fallacy: The team argues that we should reject zero-sum thinking about population, just as we do about trade or the environment.
• Quality AND quantity: Not only does the average well-being matter, but so does the number of people who get to live well. Reducing only to average well-being can lead to odd conclusions (e.g., that some happy lives “should not exist” if they’re below average).
• Choice and autonomy: None of this implies coercing people to have children, but it should shape our social priorities.

Notable Quotes

“The chance to live a good life matters. We think it does count for something in comparing stabilization to depopulation to say that more people would get to live a good life.”
— Michael Dean [42:36]

“It’s a theme of our book that other people are win-win. Their lives are good for them and good for us too.”
— Michael Dean [53:30]

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5. Timestamps & Notable Moments

• The shift from overpopulation panic to underpopulation concern: [03:18–04:09]
• Data on falling global fertility and global ‘population momentum’: [06:37–17:18]
• Education and birth rates correlation, global exceptions: [10:42–11:45]
• Environmental impacts mythbusting: [23:28–30:44]
• Economic dynamism & the need for large population for progress: [30:44–41:19]
• Philosophical debate: should the number of lives matter? [41:19–54:48]
• Summary of key philosophical dilemma and win-win thinking: [53:30–54:48]

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Memorable Quotes

• “Depopulation won’t solve climate change or reduce global poverty or make the world fairer. In fact, we stand to lose something important, because people are a core ingredient in scientific and social progress.” (Michael Dean, [04:09])
• “The whole time that the population has been growing... birth rates have been falling. And today, in two-thirds of the countries on Earth, birth rates are too low to sustain populations over time.” (Yasha Monk, [06:37])
• “When people think about population and big environmental problems like climate change, they make the error of thinking the solution is fewer people, not changing activity. But that’s never been the way environmental progress has been made.” (Michael Dean, [27:24])
• “Other people make the discoveries and have the ideas that improve our lives... without other people in a depopulating future, we wouldn’t continue to make so much progress and we’d be worse off, each of us...per person.” (Michael Dean, [30:44])
• “It’s a theme of our book that other people are win-win. Their lives are good for them and good for us too.” (Michael Dean, [53:30])

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Conclusion / Takeaways

• Depopulation, not overpopulation, is the demographic challenge of the next century.
• Falling fertility is now nearly universal—even in places like India and Iran.
• Environmental progress depends on innovation, not reducing humans. Fewer people won’t save the climate.
• Societal prosperity is built on the collaborative contributions of many.
• Both the quantity and quality of human lives matter—the more thriving lives, the better.
• Zero-sum thinking about population is outdated and countersocial.
• Concrete solutions—policy, cultural, economic—were discussed in the subscriber-only segment.

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For Further Discussion

To hear the final part of the discussion—covering solutions, the role of social policy and immigration, and the future demographic shape of society—consider subscribing to the podcast’s supporting feed.

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End of summary.

Transcript

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[Michael Dean]

We know to reject zero sum thinking about international trade. We know to reject zero sum thinking about the environment that we all have to decarbonize together. But we still have this zero sum approach to the population and to other people. And so part of what we're hoping to accomplish is to get people out of that zero sum mindset about other people and see that other people are win win. Their lives are good for them. Their lives are good for the rest of us too.

[Yasha Monk]

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

[Podcast Host]

From Thomas Malthus to Paul Ehrlich, there

[Co-host/Guest]

has long been deep concern that we may be facing a crisis of overpopulation, that if there's too many children, we can't feed them, we're depleting the resources of the planet and people might die. Well, actually, it looks like the concern at the moment might have to be in the other direction. What most people haven't realized is the extent to which we now have fertility below replacement. Not just in Italy or China or some famous places around the world, but in the United States and Canada, in some poorer countries like India or Mexico, in some places that are deeply religious or where the government at least is deeply religious, like in Iran. So I really wanted to have a

[Podcast Host]

well informed, high level conversation that explores

[Co-host/Guest]

whether this is really going to happen, whether we're going to have fewer people on planet Earth 100 years from now than today to think through whether or not that is a bad thing, why it is that we might have to worry about this in terms of our ability to sustain the welfare state, in terms of our ability to sustain an innovative economy with lots of inventions, whether perhaps we should care about it just because it's better to have more people living thriving lives on Earth than to have fewer people living thriving lives on Earth. And finally, in the third part of a conversation which is reserved for paying subscribers, we talked about what to do about all of this. Can social policies like making having kids more affordable help to fix this? Is immigration the solution and if not, why isn't that part of what we should do? Do we actually know how to turn this tanker around without restricting the autonomy of our population in ways that we would not want to do? For that part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please support this work by going to yashamonk.substack.

[Podcast Host]

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published probably the best selling book about demography ever written called the Population Bomb. On the COVID it said, while you are reading these words, four people will have died from starvation, most of them children. Ehrlich's fear was that unless we take radical steps, steps that many countries like China did take and part inspired by Ehrlich in the subsequent years to reduce the global population, we are going to have terrible human suffering on our hands. In your new book, you say that actually the concern is the other way around. Actually, the concern today is not overpopulation, but underpopulation. What did Ehrlich and other people inspired by Malthus get wrong? Why should we worry about depopulation rather than overpopulation?

[Michael Dean]

So ehrlich and the 20th century Overpopulation doomers were wrong on their values and they were wrong on the facts. Let's start with the facts. Global depopulation is now the most likely future. What global depopulation means is that every decade, every generation, the world's population will shrink. That's the path we're on. Within a few decades, the world's population will begin to decline. And there's no reason to think that once that happens, it'll automatically reverse. So a big question before us is, should we welcome that or should we want something else to happen? Ehrlich missed that depopulation was coming, and he probably wouldn't have answered the question of should we welcome it right either because depopulation won't solve climate change or reduce global poverty or make the world fairer. In fact, we stand to lose something important because people are a core ingredient in scientific and social progress. Other people are win win. Their lives are good for them and good for you.

[Podcast Host]

So I think you're already teasing two of the main questions that I want to get at in this conversation. Perhaps we'll add a third. So the first question to me is, is depopulation actually happening? Right. I think the instinct that a lot of the listeners to this podcast are going to have infowits I think are particularly interested and well informed audiences. Well, hang on a second. Isn't the population still growing a lot? Aren't there many countries in Africa that still have five, six children per woman. You know, how can we be so confident that depopulation is actually going to happen? And the second question is, well, perhaps that's a good thing. What about those concerns about climate change, the use of global resources, et cetera? Perhaps humans are a cancer on the planet and there should be fewer humans. Right. And the third question I want to get at as well, if we buy those first two arguments from you, what

[Co-host/Guest]

do we do about it?

[Podcast Host]

How do we actually respond to all of that? So let's start with this empirical premise, right? I'm a skeptic of how easy it is to project things in the social sciences. Right. Economists famously have predicted 12 out of the last few recessions. Political scientists didn't see the rise of authoritarian populism and the crisis of democracy coming at all. 2016 was a complete surprise to them. Often we get things wrong in demography as well. How can we predict with such confidence that even though the global population still seems to be growing, even though it grew a lot over the course of the 20th century, this is going to reverse very soon. We're going to start depopulation? I suspect your answer is going to have something to do with the idea of population momentum.

[Yasha Monk]

Sure. I'll take the first part of that question, and maybe it's useful to just take a step back and just give a bit of context of where we've been over the last couple of centuries. For most of human history, going back thousands of years, the gold population was pretty small. 10,000 years ago, there were maybe 5 million people on the planet, the size of Atlanta today. It wasn't until about 1800 that we had a billion people on the planet for the first time. And then in the century that followed that, through 1925, the world doubled to 2 billion. And then since then, we've quadrupled. We've doubled and doubled again to the present 8.2 billion. And I understand the intuition that many people would have that we live in a big growing world. And there's no reason to think that that's going to reverse because that's the only. That's the only experience that any of us have had is living in a population that was big and growing fast. But interestingly, this whole time that the population has been growing and that we have good statistics recording the demography, recording birth rates all around the world. That has been a period during which birth rates have been falling. So even as the population has been growing, birth rates have been falling. And that's the first clue to understand how we can know that depopulation is around the corner. So the reason that the population has been skyrocketing over the last couple centuries is not because people are having more babies than they used to. It's because we've done a better job learning how to keep people alive. And so more children grow up to become adults who have children of their own. Whereas a couple hundred years ago, maybe 30, 40, 50% of children would have died before age 5, a very small fraction, even in the poorest places of the world, die in childhood today. And so there's been these two things that have been happening simultaneously. Population's been growing, birth rates have been falling. And today, in two thirds of the countries on earth, or in 2/3 of the populations on Earth, birth rates are too low to sustain populations over time. So what's the magic number? There is a total fertility rate of 2. 2 kids per 2 adults. Below that level, each successive generation is smaller than the last. And so over the long run, the global population will shrink.

[Podcast Host]

And just to cut into for one second, I think part of the striking thing here, right, is that, yes, there are some countries that still have rapid population growth. Kenya, Chad, other places in sub Saharan Africa in particular among them. But lots of countries that I think a lot of the audience here would think are growing fast actually have now fallen below that magical threshold. So Mexico is below that magical threshold. The Islamic Republic of Iran, despite its ideology, is well below that threshold. The country of India, which is where Paul Ehrlich starts his book in 1968, describing in pretty unpleasant terms the teeming mass of humanity crushing down on him as he's walking through the old streets of Delhi that helped to inspire that fear of his, is now just about below replacement rates.

[Yasha Monk]

No, that's right. And I think some people who haven't, for good reason, this hasn't been the issue they've been paying attention to in the last decade, might think this is a phenomenon of rich countries. This is a phenomenon of, you know, North America or this phenomenon of Europe, or of a couple select Southeast Asian countries like South Korea. But India has below replacement birth rates. Latin America as a whole has a birth rate of 1.8 kids per 2 adults. So it's also on course to shrink. Really. The only region on Earth where birth rates are still above 2 is sub Saharan Africa. But there too, birth rates are falling. Whereas in the mid 20th century, there might have been five or six children per woman, today there are four, and four is still above two. But we should expect that sub Saharan Africa will follow the same course in some time that the rest of the world has as it's developed. Fewer children, smaller birth rates, and eventually on path to a shrinking population.

[Podcast Host]

And one of the striking things about sub Saharan Africa, I think, is that it is by far in the way the poorest region of the world. And there's a strong correlation between affluence and birth rates. But relative to level of gdp, Africa actually has lower birth rates than other continents that have the same stage of development.

[Michael Dean]

And education is another thing too. I mean, so I think GDP is one thing, but when we think about it, one of the things that we emphasize is the level of secondary school education, especially for girls. Sub Saharan Africa right now has a low level of female education. That's sort of like what was true for India a few decades ago. And it's sort of at an average birth rate like where India was a few decades ago. If you look right now, you know, schooling in India, like secondary schooling for girls is around 70% and their birth rate's sort of right at two, Kenya's at 53% and their birth rates at three point something, Mozambique's at around a third and their birth rate is close to five. And so it would be a real stepping off the path that other countries have followed. If as education and socioeconomic development of other sorts comes to sub Saharan Africa, we don't see birth rates falling there too, which is what the demography community basically projects.

[Podcast Host]

Isn't there one assumption behind this that perhaps we can't fully assume, which is that I buy that there's nothing culturally different or specific about Sub Saharan Africa, such that if the Philippines, which had a lot of kids at one point in time, if Pakistan, which had a lot of kids at one point in time, if Ireland, which had a lot of kids at one point in time, start to have fewer and fewer kids as it became more affluent, as more women gained an education, somehow Africa is going to be the big exception. But what we are assuming, the background here is that Africa is going to continue to develop rapidly economically, that, you know, the share of women who are able to access education is going to increase, et cetera. And can we be sure of that assumption? Can we be sure of the assumption that there's going to be that level of economic progress in Sub Saharan Africa? Can we be sure, for that matter, that there might not be regions in the world that fall back into abject poverty where perhaps fewer people are going to be able to access education in the future, and where therefore we also see a commensurate rise in the fertility rate in the decades to come.

[Yasha Monk]

No, I think there's no guarantees of anything. So let's be really clear about this. When, when we raise the sound, the wake up call about global depopulation, we're not making a prediction that there's a guarantee that depopulation is going to begin in 2060 or 2070 or 2080. Those are the ranges of forecasts and projections that groups like the UN put forth. Certainly all sorts of futures are possible. And in some sense, if we didn't think that something different than global depopulation was possible in the, you know, at the end of the century, we wouldn't have written this book. Now, the possibility that you're raising that things just get worse, that we regress on all sorts of progress socially, economically, and that ends up being a cause of birth rates rising. I don't think we're at the end of history. I think, you know, we can't. There's no guarantees that progress will continue. But that would be awful, right? Like that's, we're talking about one sort of risk here, which is the risk that even as the world gets better, we're headed to this unfamiliar future because the globe is going to shrink rapidly. You're talking about another sort of risk where we actually fail to continue to make progress and regress. And that's also a risk we should take seriously too. But I want to say just one word because I think it can be hard to really get a feel for how quickly global depopulation could happen. We've had this sort of hockey stick growth in the global human population over the last couple centuries, but the decline could be just as steep. And a way to see this is think about a birth rate like China has right now. China's an outlier, it's relatively low, but it makes the math a lot easier to do in our heads. So for the Chinese birth rate right now, total fertility rate is 1, which means that for two adults, there's one child. And so what that means is that in a generation of adults of 100 people, there would be 50 children. And then in the following generation, the grandchildren generation, there would be 25 grandchildren. So that means that over the course of a couple generations, maybe 60 or 70 years, you would have the size of cohorts declining by 75%. And if you think to some numbers that we can't do in our head, but are maybe more representative of the world, the average birth rate in the 140 richest countries today is about 1.5. Averaged over all of those countries, an average birth rate of 1.5 is a future in which the global population declines by 10% every decade, by two thirds every century. And so this really could come fast in a way that I think is sort of not very apparent or visible when we look around the world and we see a birth rate like 1.5, which is probably not very different from where you are in Maryland or Virginia and D.C. and think of that as sort of normal because that normalcy is going to lead to something profoundly unfamiliar in the future.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And I think there's a lot of things about this map that is unintuitive and really important to understand. Right. It doesn't feel like, you know, whether on average families have two kids or on average that have 1.5 kids is going to make such a vast difference. But you play out the math and it turns out that it does make that very, very big difference, which is something that people really, I think, underestimate. You know, I want to get for a moment at this idea of population momentum. You know, one of the things that makes it hard to predict a business cycle, for example, is that things can turn very, very quickly. And Something that happened 20 years ago doesn't necessarily have a big impact on what the economy is today, at least in terms of whether it's growing or declining in demography, it's still difficult to predict. And I'm struck, having done a little bit of research on this, that the four major organizations trying to predict exactly how many people there's going to be in 2100 have pretty different views about this. But there's this idea of population momentum that does allow us to make predictions with greater accuracy than in some other areas of circle science. Because if you want somebody to have a kid 25 years from now, they're probably going to be born today or they're going to be born in 10 years or whatever. Right. Like the size of a cohort of one year olds today just says tells you something about the kind of parameters of how many children people might have in 20, 30, 40 years. So tell us a little bit about that and tell us what you think the most realistic scenario is for what the world population is going to look like in 25 years, in 50 years, in 100 years, perhaps, if you want to go that far, in 200 years, given the slightly different estimates made by different organizations, what is the best projection? And presumably that informed your book title after the spike. Are we coming down from the spike and what does the world look like once we've passed this pike?

[Michael Dean]

Yeah, so population momentum is an idea from formal demography that is about how the age structure of the population impacts how population growth unfolds separate from birth rates and death rates. So the biggest picture, the Earth, is a closed system. We enter it by being born, we leave it by dying. So birth rates and death rates are going to completely pin down the simplest model of how population changes, but that's in a medium to long run, in a short to medium run. The fact that there are, for example, a lot of children alive right now means that they're going to grow up and have children. And so that fact about how old people are is going to change how the population grows. And so the surprising fact about population momentum is that even if birth rates were to go to two today, or to go to whatever the replacement level is, the size of the population would keep growing for decades as the children that we have now grow up into being of reproductive age and have children. And so there's only so much that the size of the population, the world's population, could deviate from its most likely path over the coming decades, even if birth rates are very different. So that's one thing that we know about what's likely to happen, but that's very different from exactly what is going to be the size of the world population or the speed at which the population is changing in the 2000-80s and 2100 or 2200 here. I think the most important thing to say is no, of course we don't have a crystal ball and we don't know exactly how far below 2 the world's average birth rate is going to fall. But in some sense, we don't need to understand the most important thing, which is that depopulation is the most likely future. If, on average, the birth rate is less than two kids per two adults, if it's essentially anywhere for the world as a whole, less than an average of two kids per two adults, then we're going to get global depopulation. And the same exponential algebra that governed the upslope would govern the downslope. So it could be very fast. The size of the world population quadrupled in the past hundred years. The decrease could be similar. The size of the world population doubled in the hundred years before that. The decrease could be similar. Exactly which of those speeds it will be depends on just how fast the or just how low the average birth rate falls below 2. Do we have reason to expect that it's definitely going to be 1.5 like in Europe, or 1.6 in the US. No, like we said, we don't know exactly how fast education is going to change in Africa. We don't really even know how much of that is an effect of education, as opposed to the fact that people who would have had different numbers of kids are more or less likely to go to school anyway. There are lots of details like that that we don't know, and those details rightly fill the careers of population scientists and journals and research papers and understanding them. But for the biggest picture, which is that depopulation is the most likely future, and that once it happens it could be fast and exponential, all we need to know is that it's likely that the average birth rate for the world as a whole is going to go somewhere below 2 for a long time.

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[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it seems to me having looked at this a little bit, but there is very good reason to think that and there's even stronger reason to be confident that all of those countries that now have birth rates that are significantly below 2 are going to be depopulating. It may be A little bit harder to predict exactly the speed with which fertility rates are going to continue falling in sub Saharan Africa. It is very clear that the next generation, the generation after that, is going to be vastly smaller in Italy, in China, probably, given the trends for the last few years in the United States as well. And that in itself is a topic worth taking very seriously. So I want to shift, as it were, to the second set of questions that I'm sure listeners are going to have, and that is all right. So let's say that we are after the spike, that we're in the last little moments in which population is continuing to grow, just because the way that age cohorts work. But you know, we're about to start experiencing this rapid decline in population. Well, why is that a bad thing? Isn't it the case that we're so worried about climate change? Isn't it the case that the Club of Rome keeps talking about all of the global resources that are being depleted? Isn't it the case that finding an apartment in New York City or Tokyo or Paris is already incredibly expensive? Wouldn't in some ways be nicer if we had fewer people? Why do you think the world would not, in fact, be nicer if we were experiencing, Certainly, let's leave some poorer parts of the world out of the picture at the moment. Certainly, if affluent societies like the United States, like Southern Europe, like East Asia were to experience a very rapid population decline in years to come.

[Michael Dean]

Yeah.

[Yasha Monk]

So this is maybe the most frequent comment, question, reaction that I hear from all sorts of people, including our students at the University of Texas, when we talk about population change is this idea that, look, human activity pollutes, it destroys. Wouldn't things just be better for all sorts of things we care about and especially environmental outcomes, if there were just fewer of us? And also, wouldn't there be more to go around? Maybe. Let's hold that second one for a moment and hold first on the environment. The problem with that is that the facts in history just don't bear out that logic in a way that we might expect. So let me tell a little story. So in 2013 in China, the smog there was making international news. Newspapers were calling it the air apocalypse, the particulate matter, air pollution, which comes from burning coal and vehicle exhaust and wildfires that was completely choking the sky. There's a standard air quality index measure that goes from 0 to 500. And the reading in Beijing on that scale from 0 to 500 was 755. So this was like an international scandal. And so that was 2013. In the decade that followed, China added 50 million people to its population. So that's like the size of the population of Canada. It's bigger than Texas, it's bigger than California, just that addition. And so how much worse did air pollution get over that decade? Maybe surprisingly, if what you expect is more people mean more problems. Air pollution fell by half. And it's not just China. It's not sort of a cherry picked example as over the last decade, the world as a whole added three quarters of a billion people. Air pollution, overall, particulate air pollution has fallen. And facts like that kind of challenge this basic assumption that so many of us have, that more people means more environmental problems. And at the core of that, I think, is a bit of a misunderstanding of how environmental progress, where it's been achieved, when it's been achieved, actually worked. I've been thinking recently about the problem, to give an example, the problem of lead in the air in the 1960s in the US so in the 1960s, people were breathing in lead in the air. The reason they were breathing in lead was that we were burning leaded gasoline in our vehicles. Today we don't breathe in lead. An additional person in the United States doesn't cause more lead to be pumped into the air. And the reason is that in the 1970s, through the Clean Air act, other regulation, we regulated leaded gasoline basically out of existence. It would have been silly in 1970 to think that the way we're going to deal with lead in the air is that we're going to wait for or hope for, or try to bring about a scenario in which there's fewer drivers. Right. That just would not have been a serious solution to the problem of burning lead and breathing it in. That's something that needed to be taken on directly by targeting the pollution. And I worry that when people think about population and big environmental problems like climate change, they're sometimes making the same sort of error. They're thinking that the way to bring down greenhouse gas emissions, which are caused by human activity, is to reduce the number of humans, not to change the activity. But that's never been the way that environmental progress has been made. You know, if we want to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, we need to build solar farms, turn on wind turbines, activate nuclear reactors, lay transmission lines across, you know, the United States to move energy from where the sun is shining and where the wind is blowing to where it's not. A smaller population in itself is not going to accomplish any of that, nor is it going to like green our industrial technologies. A smaller population is not going to cause the invention of low carbon concrete. So the lesson that we should learn from the history of environmental progress, and there has been environmental progress, we've cleaned the water, we've reduced the damage that we were doing to the stratospheric ozone layer, the protective stratospheric ozone layer. We've taken lead out of the air, we've been cleaning up particulate air pollution. All of that has happened by directly targeting the pollutants. And so, you know, the way I think about this is dealing with huge environmental challenges like climate change are going to require that billions of us live and consume differently. It's not going to require that billions of us never live. And I think we've for too long been sort of taking. You mentioned Ehrlich at the top of the show. And I think for too long we've been riding the same line that Ehrlich set up for us in 1968, thinking that people are problems and every additional person just increases our problems. But that's just not what history has shown.

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[Podcast Host]

It feels like this podcast is turning into a math podcast, which is not my usual style, but again, on the math of carbon emissions, I was really struck when I read about this. So Britain is debating whether it should stick to its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. If we're serious about curbing climate change, we need to find some solution like that, where basically we're no longer emitting any net carbon in the course of the next 30 years or so. Now let's imagine for the sake of argument, which actually turns out to be wrong, because there's a lot of pre existing infrastructure, because it's more dense, cities actually emit far less carbon per person than more rural living, et cetera. But let's assume for the sake of argument that each additional person is proportionately more carbon emitted, that one person less is proportionately less carbon emitted. And let's say that the population of the United States would shrink by 25% by 2050, which would be incredibly rapid and set up a huge population problem down the line, well, that's just not enough. Right. If we reduce the carbon we're emitting by 25% by 2050, this is one of the nightmare scenarios where climate change is probably going to go completely out of whack. So it's just, if you're thinking about what are the levers in order to solve climate change, the kind of dimensions that we're talking about with human population, unless there's a catastrophic nuclear war that decimates the population by 99.9%, it's just not going to get us to where we need to get on climate change. And that, I think, is really instructive to say, look, if the United States population shrunk by 25% and it meant, which it doesn't, that that reduces carbon by 25%, we still wouldn't be anywhere close to the scale of solution we need in order to deal with a problem of climate change. Going beyond the environmental question, what other reasons do we have to worry about this? I mean, why is it that a society which is rapidly depopulating might not have economic dynamism we take for granted, might struggle to provide for its older people or for other people who are needy? Maybe less inventive, may just be less appealing in all kinds of different dimensions?

[Michael Dean]

Here's one reason why depopulation matters and why we should want to avoid it, which is that we're all made better off by sharing the world with more other people. Other people alive alongside us and alive before us, because other people make the discoveries and have the ideas that improve our lives. Other people are where science and knowledge come from. So it sounds counterintuitive to think that other people could improve our living standards and be good for us. And so let's start with a big why are our lives today Better than lives 200 years ago or 300 years ago? Why do we have shoes on our feet and glasses to correct our vision and plenty to eat and shorter work days and medicines to treat our diseases and a huge library of literature and so much social insurance for people who are elderly and disabled. Why do we have all of these things? It's the same dirt beneath our feet. It's the same sun shining on us, the same wind. There's so much that's the same. What's different is that we know more. We now know what to do with the resources on the Earth. We now know how to organize ourselves better. We know how to farm more efficiently and make computer chips and make soap to keep us from getting infections, make antibiotics to treat infections if we get them anyway. And most importantly, we have a germ theory of disease to better understand what an infection is in the first place. And all of these things are ideas or discoveries or notions or creations that people had over those couple hundred years between now and then. 200 years ago, there were an eighth as many of us. There were about a billion of us. And so imagine if all along, every year, somehow we got to it being 20, 25, and there were a billion of us every year. Does it really seem plausible that we could know and understand the things that we do? Would we know the things we now know about how to organize a cancer drug trial, or a kindergarten that teaches phonics, or a parliamentary democracy? We learned all of these things together as one generation, iterated on the advances of the last, as a mentee, carried further the ideas of a mentor, as team members discovered together what none could do alone. Paul Romer is an economist who won a Nobel Prize, an economics Nobel Prize, for working out the formal theory behind this idea. And the critical economic idea is that knowledge is a special resource that gets used, but doesn't get used up. So if a child's infection is treated with an antibiotic, something that nobody could have done 150 years ago, then that pill is gone. No one's ever going to take that antibiotic pill again. But the formula behind that pill, the formula of the drug, and, you know, more importantly the scientific knowledge and the germ theory of disease that let them make it, that all remains, that's all still there for someone else to use again. So when we think about the economics of population, we might, the place we might go first is to think about resources getting used up. But what Romer's theory of endogenous growth tells us and what we see in the world and in the evidence is that the most important resource for improving our living standards are these sorts of ideas, and they have come from the work and the collaborations of other people. So without other people in a depopulating future, we wouldn't continue to make so much progress and we'd be worse off, each of us, we'd be worse off per person than in a stabilized future that didn't depopulate.

[Podcast Host]

So let me push you on this idea for a moment. There's something plausible about this, right? That there are rare geniuses in the world who are able to have ideas that perhaps other people might not. Or to put it differently, that perhaps some ideas just take a lot of collaboration, takes a lot of people working on them and the more people we have, the more likely we are to be able to do that. There's also kind of different intuition, right, which is to say that when you

[Co-host/Guest]

look at the contributions of some of

[Podcast Host]

the great figures in history, you know, Michelangelo, Plato, whoever, partially, they could contribute to so many different fields because there wasn't as much knowledge there, there weren't as many people competing for these ideas and so on. Right. And so perhaps if we didn't have as many people, then the people who are really brilliant could just make more contributions to more different fields. And if there's an idea out there to be had, perhaps an affluent world with 2 billion people might end up discovering a very similar amount than an affluent world with 10 billion people. How convincing is it that really the rate of progress is going to slow so significantly just because there's fewer people?

[Co-host/Guest]

And is the main concern we have

[Podcast Host]

about the sheer number of people that are there to make those discoveries, or is it about how dynamic a society is? Right. I mean, another element of a shrinking society is just one that, you know, if we want to make sure that people are well taken care of when they're elderly, you know, we just have to allocate an ever growing percentage of our wealth to the healthcare system, to people who look after those elderly folks. Right. You know, perhaps if there's need for social changes, those are very, very hard to get through in a population that screws really older elderly because they're much more likely to resist various changes. When I look at Europe today, there's a huge need for investment into the technologies of the future, into revitalizing the European economy. One reason that's hard to do is that a huge percentage of state expenditures goes on very generous pension schemes. And since pensioners are such a big share of the electorate, and since they're more likely to vote, any politician who tries to change that might run into trouble. Right.

[Co-host/Guest]

So is the main concern really this

[Podcast Host]

idea about just the sheer number of inventions we're going to have in the world in order to make it better, or is it more about the dynamic and the age structure you're going to have in that kind of society? Or perhaps is it both? And if so, why?

[Yasha Monk]

Yeah, so I think it is both. And I think these things operate on different timescales. I think in the short run there's going to be fiscal pressures on governments as the populations age and as there's a smaller share of people who are working in, a larger share of people who are retirees who need social support through pension, public Pension systems, public healthcare systems. What we are most interested in in our book is the other, the longer term consequences. One thing that you mentioned was this idea that people like Michelangelo could contribute to so many fields because there just weren't that many other people innovating. You might say the same thing about someone like Newton who would contribute to calculus and contribute to physics. Right. One of the. I'll try not to get too deep into the economic weeds, but one of the active areas of research in economics is the question of our ideas getting harder to find. In some sense, people like Newton might have picked all the low hanging fruit. And so now we have to work harder and harder to squeeze the next Timmix metaphors to squeeze the next bit of juice out of the fruit on the tree, we have to climb higher. It's harder, it's more difficult. And so that means that two things can be true. It might have been the case that progress measured however you want to measure it, in terms of longer lifespans, better lives, higher gdp, wherever you get a proxy for that, that progress in productivity was not so much slower long ago than today, when long ago there were fewer people. But in part that's because it is now taking larger teams of people, more research effort, a higher fraction of the population dedicated to innovation and R and D and pressing the frontier forward to actually continue making the same annual rate of progress that relatively few people could do in our past. So I actually think looking back to the past and saying, look, we made a lot of progress back then with these rare luminaries is actually a, not a good model to think about what might be true of our future when we need to assemble like a huge complex web of niche specialization, you know, to get our next innovation. The, you know, for example, the MRNA vaccines that came just in time to rescue us from the worst outcomes of COVID That was a collaboration or sort of a synthesis of work that spanned states and countries and decades and specialties. And you know, that's not unlike Newton writing the Principia. That's not something that a single person can do. So actually, I actually do think that there's something serious at risk when we're talking about a shrinking, a global population that relies on such niche specialization to make progress.

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[Podcast Host]

I do find that convincing. Part of his argument is not just, you know, one I think, slightly naive version of his argument is just to say we need geniuses in the world to discover stuff, and if we only have a billion people, then it's not going to be enough geniuses. And if we have 10 billion people, there's going to be enough geniuses, or something like that. And that doesn't strike me particularly convincing, in part because in a much smaller world in the past, there were people we now think of, I think, rightly, as geniuses, and in part because there would still be a lot of people, because that's not exactly how discoveries work today. In fact, the reason why it's hard to have geniuses today is precisely because we're so specialized. But there's another set of arguments which is not just about the availability of the super smart, specialized researchers who are able to develop those special skills that it takes now in order to discover those ideas that are harder to reach. It's also about the demand for that, actually. You know, in order to have this team of 200 people working on commercializing the MRNA vaccine, you also have to have a market which you think is going to make it financially viable. And if you have a lot fewer people in the world, a lot fewer of those kind of activities are going to be financially viable. And we're just not going to be able to marshal the economic resources to have all of those different teams deployed to do that. And that's, I think, part of the dynamic here as well.

[Co-host/Guest]

There is another argument, too, which is

[Podcast Host]

a little bit more philosophical, and I wonder how you feel about it. Should we just care in itself about the size of the population? Obviously we would care if 9 billion people died in some horrible accident, right? Let's assume there would be 10 billion people in the world, which isn't quite yet. If 9 billion people died of nuclear war, some kind of terrible natural disaster, of course we would care, because we're a human who are already there. And I think, I hope that the listeners to this podcast will share that intuition. Now, I think the intuitions go further apart when we say, well, look, people having fewer children is not some horrible natural disaster. It's not some awful accident in which people die a horrible death. It's just lives were never born. And if by this natural process that doesn't involve suffering, we end up with a world of 1 billion people, is that just as good as having a

[Co-host/Guest]

world of 10 billion people?

[Podcast Host]

Assuming that those lives are similarly thriving. I mean, is there just a reason to think, if we can have a world in which there's 10 billion people, most of whom lead thriving lives, should we prefer that to having a world in which there's only 1 billion people who have thriving lives? How do we think about that? Slightly abstract, but I think important and interesting philosophical dimension.

[Michael Dean]

So a big part of the case for people and why it matters if the future is on a path towards depopulation or on a path towards stabilization, is that it's not the same for living standards. It wouldn't be the case that we would have the same level of thriving, the same level of poverty reduction. We wouldn't be on the same path towards abundance, towards continuing the global fight against infant mortality and other problems because of what people do for one another. And part of that we've talked about is innovation, which really isn't about geniuses, it's just about the way that we all build upon the ideas of one another. And part of that is, as you say, the fact that when other people want and need the things that we want and need, they make it more likely for us to get it. So if other people need the same specialized medical treatment that you need, then they're making it more likely that that sort of hospital service is available. If other people want and need the same transportation network that you do, they're making it more likely to exist. So other people make us better off per person, and so we wouldn't have the same sorts of progress towards better living standards in abundance without them. But there's another part of the case for people to ask about, which is that many billions of lives that could be excellent and full of well being and joy would never be lived on the path to depopulation. So one of the biggest and toughest questions for people to grapple with is would that silence be a peace to welcome or a loss and an absence to mourn? What does it matter if another person gets to be born to live a good life? And what if it matters? What does it matter if they don't? What if billions of people don't? And so we can stack up and tabulate the consequences for parents, for the environment. We can do the economics about technological progress and living standards. But this question is, should we also give some consideration, maybe not every consideration, but not zero to the would be people who would exist if the population stabilizes and not exist as the population declines? Does that figure into our thinking about what would be better? Or should we only care about the well being of people here. And now, our answer that we give in the book and that we talk through is that we think that the chance to live a good life matters. We think it does count for something in comparing stabilization to depopulation to say that more people would get to live a good life. Now, that doesn't imply that anybody should try to force anybody else to be a parent or not to be a parent. Something can both matter and be a matter of free choice. We think that whether or not billions of people have a chance to live a good life is one of the things that matters when we're considering whether stabilization or depopulation would be a better future.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, and I know from experience talking to people about this that my instincts on this, my intuitions on this differ quite widely from those of many others. So I think that probably a lot of people listening to this just don't have that same instinct. And that's a very complicated, interesting philosophical literature on how to think through this question, inspired by Darat Parfitt and then taken up by many other researchers over the last decades. But to me, there is a relatively simple thought experiment which indicates why we should care. Which is if you say is a world better in which there's 10 billion people living thriving lives or one in which 1 billion people are living thriving lives? A lot of people don't have a strong intuition. And I think that's partially because as people who think about economic policy a lot say anything with too many numbers of them just looks the same to people. Whether some bill costs $5 billion or $1 trillion, it's a humongous difference, but it kind of sounds the same, right? I mean, I think about this stuff quite a lot for my work, and even to me, this is going to test 5 billion people, 1 trillion people. I know rationally it's not the same, but it feels the same, right? And I think there's something similar about that. Like a billion people is so unimaginably large that perhaps 1 billion people is just as good as 10 billion.

[Yasha Monk]

Who cares?

[Podcast Host]

It's all big numbers, right? But let's spread the numbers out a little bit further. Let's imagine one world in which there's a billion people living worthwhile lives, you know, starting families, producing art, hanging out with each other, you know, having a thriving human life and the other society, there's 10 people living thriving lives. Now, I take your point, Dean, that actually is very hard to imagine that 10 people really could lead such thriving lives, because there wouldn't be the economies of scale and all of the specialization so on. We need to make. There's not many antibiotics in the world of 10 people. Let's let all of that aside, right? We're in a world where 10 people live these thriving lives. Obviously, to me it seems like, well, that's just 10 people. I'm glad they're having good lives, but

[Co-host/Guest]

that's very few people. There's so little variety of human experience, et cetera.

[Podcast Host]

Surely it would be better to have a world of a billion people than a world of 10 people. And so it seems to me that indicates that we do have a strong intuition that actually the number of people matters and that if we can increase the number of people who live with our lives per 10x, that's something we should care about, even if we're talking about numbers that are kind of so abstract that we don't immediately feel that intuition.

[Michael Dean]

I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the starting points in our book is that, you know, we say that the general welfare matters. That when it comes to questions of what societies and governments should do, then caring about the general welfare, about how well things go overall, just has to be an important item on the list of things that matter. You know, other things can matter too. The US Constitution says that we should promote the general welfare and also have a list of rights. And so all I'm trying to say right now is that the overall general welfare, how good things are going, how good the future is, is one of the things that matters. And so then the question is the question that you're asking, you know, if there are 10 billion people or 10 hundred people or 10 people, and they somehow had the same quality of life, you know, would that matter? Would that make a difference? And I think, you know, that's one intuition you have. Other people have other intuitions, you know, I don't think that a few minutes of podcast is going to settle the question for very many people, but we can go beyond intuition. And that's one of the things that we talk about in the book. You know, so, for example, some people say that what matters is the quality of life, not the quantity. And so you would want to measure that with how well people are on average. If 10 billion people and 1 billion people had the same quality of life on average, then, you know, judging what future would be better, these would say it's just as good. So if all that matters is average well being, then, you know, that would be a tie. But the average, along with any other metric that Only cares about the quality of life, not about the quantity of life is turns out to be a bad way to assess things. Turns out to be a bad measurement of the general welfare. And here's sort of how we can see that the average or that ignoring the quantity of lives is a bad way to assess things. So imagine a child born in Uttar Pradesh, which is a disadvantaged state in India. It turns out to be the place where I do my research and I work and you know, imagine this kid born in Uttar Pradesh, is born next year and that she's lucky, she's poor by your standards, but her family loves her, she manages to avoid serious illness, she's happy and healthy as a child. She enjoys her siblings, she rides the tide of improving gender equity to get to go to a school she likes and she finds a job she's proud of, maybe as a nurse and as an adult she still enjoys her siblings and gets to call them and talk with them, walking to and from work. She has an arranged marriage, but her parents give her a say in it and it turns out to be a good match. And she's friends with her sisters in law and you know, she likes being a parent and things go well for her in her adult life, she's healthier and wealthier and safer than most women who grew up in that part of the world in decades and centuries past. Even if she's not as healthy and wealthy as we are, or as most people who read this book. And so in short, she grows up to live a life that's happy but also below average for the world in 2025. Now she wouldn't trade her life for non existence. After thoughtful meditation on the question, she's glad to be alive, but her well being, what if we further imagine that it's below average not only for 2025 but for all time, right? So as part of the overall human population, her life is good to her, but below average. And so here's the question, did her life, did her existence make things worse? Would the general welfare have been better without her? Not according to her. She wants her life. And we say that makes a lot of sense. But if what you're fixated on is average well being and you're ignoring the quantity, then you'd be locked into saying that the universe would be better off without her because her existence would nudge down the average. And so that's one way to see that this average only approach goes wrong. And more broadly that any approach that only looks at the quality of lives and not the Quantity of lives has to go wrong as an account of the general welfare. You know, what we say is that both the quality of lives and the quantity of lives matter. That still leaves open plenty of open questions. How exactly should we weigh quality against quantity? And how should we make trade offs? And we talk about these things, but we don't really need to settle those to know what to do between depopulation and stabilization. Because a stabilized future compared to a depopulating future is going to be one where both the average quality of life is greater, the overall quantity of life is better, things are going to be better on average and in total. And that's a theme of our book, that other people are win win, other people are good for them and good for you. And so we're used to seeing, we're used to rejecting this sort of zero sum thinking in so many other areas. We know to reject zero sum thinking about international trade. We know to reject zero sum thinking about the environment that we all have to decarbonize together. But we still have this zero sum approach to the population and to other people. And so part of what we're hoping to accomplish is to get people out of that zero sum mindset about other people and see that other people are win win. Their lives are good for them and their lives are good for the rest of us too.

[Yasha Monk]

So let me just bring this back to the sort of the practical question about birth rates and depopulation. One thing that came up in this discussion is comparing this 10 billion person population to a 1 billion person population. And although I think we haven't been super clear about this so far, what Dean and I are advocating for is not population growth unending, it's a stable population at some level. And we're not here to say exactly what that level should be, only that it shouldn't be depopulation forever. But on this question of a 10 billion person population versus a 10,000 person population or a 1 billion person population, something that I think may not be obvious is that to achieve any of those states, whether it's a stable population at 1 billion, 2 billion, 4 billion, if that's what you want, then at a practical level you want the same thing as we do. You just want it at a different point in time, which is for any population to stabilize at any level, even a tiny population, there needs to be about 2 births per 2 adults on average over the long term across the globe as a whole. So the practical question of what this means for birth rates actually does not hinge on whether you think the right population size is 10 billion people or 8 billion people or 1 billion people?

[Podcast Host]

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight.

[Co-host/Guest]

In the last part of the this week's conversation, Michael Dean and I talk

[Podcast Host]

about what to do, whether there are

[Co-host/Guest]

any solutions to the looming crisis of depopulation, whether social policy can help to fix this, whether the root cause lies in parents feeling that they have to do too much for their children financially or in other terms, whether we have too intensive parenting model today, whether or not immigration can help to fix this problem and slow demographic decline, whether there's a risk or a possibility that small, very religious groups are going to grow so fast that they take over the population growth from the rest of us that perhaps in 50 or 100 or 150 years, a lot of the United States will consist of Amish and Orthodox Jews and Salafi Muslims and Evangelical Christians rather than the secular population we have today. To listen to that part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please go to jasamunk.substack.com and set up your private feed for this podcast. Jasamunk.substack dot com Listening to every full episode without ads will cost you less than a coffee a week, and it

[Podcast Host]

would allow us to keep running this podcast. Yashamonk.substack.com thank you very much for your support.

[Co-host/Guest]

Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight.

[Podcast Host]

Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show.

[Co-host/Guest]

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[Podcast Host]

Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it. Share it on Facebook or Twitter.

[Co-host/Guest]

And finally, please mail suggestions for great

[Podcast Host]

guests or comments about the show to

[Co-host/Guest]

goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com

[Yasha Monk]

this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.

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