Michael Geruso and Katy Milkman - After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

Video Description

Most people on Earth today live in a country where birth rates already are too low to stabilize the population: fewer than two children for every two adults. In "After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People," economists Dean Spears, Ph.D., and Michael Geruso, Ph.D., sound a wakeup call, explaining why global depopulation is coming, why it matters, and what to do now. It would be easy to think that fewer people would be better—better for the planet, better for the people who remain. This book invites us all to think again. Despite what we may have been told, depopulation is not the solution we urgently need for environmental challenges like climate change. Nor will it raise living standards by dividing what the world can offer across fewer of us. Spears and Geruso investigate what depopulation would mean for the climate, for living standards, for equity, for progress, for freedom, for humanity’s general welfare. And what it would mean if, instead, people came together to share the work of caregiving and of building societies where parenting fits better with everything else that people aspire to. With new evidence and sharp insights, Spears and Geruso make a lively and compelling case for stabilizing the population—without sacrificing our dreams of a greener future or reverting to past gender inequities. They challenge us to see how depopulation threatens social equity and material progress, and how welcoming it denies the inherent value of every human life. More than an assembly of the most important facts, "After the Spike" asks what future we should want for our planet, for our children, and for one another. Geruso is an economic demographer, public economist, and associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. He served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he advised on issues of health and demography. He holds bachelor’s degrees in engineering, political science, and philosophy, and earned his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton. Geruso will be in conversation with Katy Milkman, Ph.D., the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the host of Charles Schwab’s popular behavioral economics podcast Choiceology. She is also the co-founder and co-director (with Angela Duckworth, Ph.D., FAN ’12, ’16) of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at Penn.