Should You Be Having More Babies?

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Dean Spears does not want to alarm you. The co-author of After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People argues that alarmist words such as crisis or urgent will just detract from the cold, hard numbers, which show that in roughly 60 years, the world population could plummet to a size not seen for centuries. Alarmism might also make people tune out, which means they won’t engage with the culturally fraught project of asking people—that is, women—to have more babies.

Recently, in the United States and other Western countries, having or not having children is sometimes framed as a political affiliation: You’re either in league with conservative pronatalists, or you’re making the ultimate personal sacrifice to reduce your carbon footprint. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Spears makes the case for more people. He discusses the population spike over human history and the coming decline, and how to gingerly move the population discussion beyond politics.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There are those that would have us believe that having babies—or not having babies—is a political act, something that transmits your allegiance to one cultural movement or another. On the right, J. D. Vance wants, quote, “more babies in the United States,” while Elon Musk does his part, personally, to answer the call. Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA said this to an audience of young conservative women:

Rosin: On the political left and elsewhere, people agonize about whether to have children at all: for environmental reasons, or money reasons, or I just don’t want to spend my time that way reasons.

Rosin: But if you move the discussion outside politics and into just sheer demographics—how many humans, ideally, do we want on Earth?—a whole different conversation is beginning about a potential crisis coming that we are not paying attention to, at least by some people’s accounts.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

Around the world, and in wealthy countries in particular, the birth rate is dropping. Today, the birth rate in the U.S. is 1.6 babies per woman, significantly below the required replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman.

We’re used to hearing conservatives talk about the need for “lots of children.” But today we are hearing from someone outside this political debate about why everyone—liberals in particular—should care about depopulation.

Rosin: That is Dean Spears, an economist at UT Austin and co-author of a new book, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People. I talked to Dean about why we should care about depopulation.

[Music]

Rosin: I grew up in the shadow of the Paul Ehrlich book The Population Bomb. I was actually a high-school debater, and we were always making the argument, Oh, we’re headed towards a degree of overpopulation that’s going to explode the Earth. Like, that was so much in the consciousness. The idea that more people equals bad, it was just deeply ingrained, and it still kind of is for young people. So what’s incorrect about that argument?

Spears: So I think the most important part of that is the environment. And there’s something importantly right there. We do have big environmental challenges, and people cause them. Human activity causes greenhouse-gas emissions and has other destructive consequences. And so it’s really natural to think that the way to protect the environment is to have fewer humans. And maybe we would be in a different position right now with the environment if the population trajectory had been different in decades and centuries past. But that’s not really the question we face right now.

The question we face right now is: Given our urgent environmental problems, are fewer people the solution? And fewer people aren’t the solution now. And so here’s one way to think about it. Consider the story of particle air pollution in China.

[Music]

Spears: In 2013, China faced a smog crisis. Particulate air pollution from fires, coal plants, and vehicle exhaust darkened the sky. Newspapers around the world called it the airpocalypse.” The United States’ embassy in Beijing rated the air pollution a reading of 755 on a scale of zero to 500. This stuff is terrible for children’s health and survival, and older adult mortality too. So what happened next?

In the decade that followed this airpocalypse, China grew by 50 million people. That’s an addition larger than the entire population of Canada or Argentina. And so if the story is right that population growth always makes environmental problems worse, we might wonder: How much worse did the air pollution in China get? But the answer is that over that same decade, particulate air pollution in China declined by half.

That was because policy changed, because the public and leaders there decided that the smog was unacceptable. There’s new regulations. They shut down coal plants. They enforced new rules. And it’s not just China—over the last decade, global average exposure to particulate air pollution has fallen, even as the world’s population has grown by over 750 million people. And so I tell this story not because climate change is going to be as straightforward as air pollution has been—as particle air pollution has—but just to challenge the story that environmental damage has to move in tandem with population size.

Every time we’ve made progress against environmental challenges before, it’s been by changing what we do, changing policy, doing something different. So the way we responded to the hole in the ozone layer in the ’80s was banning chlorofluorocarbons. The way we responded to lead in gas in the 1970s was with the Clean Air Act, and same thing for acid rain and sulfur dioxide in the 1990s.

People do destructive activity, but the way we stop that is by stopping the destructive activity with better policy and better enforcement, and implementing better technologies. We’ve never solved a problem like that before with less people.

Rosin: Let’s lay some  groundwork just on the numbers—like, what actually is happening with the world population. Your book is called After the Spike, which is a very dramatic phrase. Can you explain the spike?

Spears: So the spike is our term for the upslope that’s happened, that’s brought us here. So for a very long time, the global human population was pretty small: 10,000 years ago, there were less than 5 million people. But that started to change a few hundred years ago, when we got better at keeping one another alive, and especially keeping our children alive, with interventions like sanitation and the germ theory of disease. So there were a billion of us in 1800, doubling to 2 billion 100 years later, and quadrupling since then. So that upslope to today is what we call the “spike.”

But all along, while the population has been growing, birth rates have been falling. So falling birth rates is nothing new, which is something you might miss in this new discourse around it. Birth rates have been falling for decades or centuries. The only reason the population’s been growing has been because mortality rates, especially child-mortality rates, have been falling. So eventually, we’ll get to a year when there are more deaths than births. The UN projects that’ll be in the 2080s, and then the size of the world population will peak and begin to decline.

Rosin: That population decline that comes after the spike? It’s unprecedented, a free fall, looking over the edge of the cliff. That, for Spears, is the unnerving part.

After the population peaks in about 60 years, it’s not expected to then plateau or stabilize. If birth rates stay the same, it will continue to drop without end, bringing the global population back down to a size not seen for centuries, possibly eventually all the way down to zero.

[Music]

Rosin: But I’m still trying to understand why. Why are birth rates dropping in the first place?

Spears: This is something where everybody has a theory, and everybody’s theory is different if you ask different professors. And, you know, I think none of them really explained the bigness of falling birth rates, the fact that low and falling birth rates are found around the world in societies that are really different from one another. And the trend’s been going down for a long time. So you might hear social conservatives talk about—“the problem,” in their mind, would be the retreat from marriage or retreat from religiosity or just feminism itself.

But let’s look at the facts. Latin America is a place where about 90 percent of people tell Pew surveyors that they’re Christian, and it has a birth rate of 1.8. India, for almost everybody, religion is a part of their lives, and the birth rate is below 2.0. Also, when you think about marriage, India is a place where almost everybody gets married, more often than not an arranged marriage, so a fairly traditionalist one. South Korea—you know, for the sort of theory that would blame the gender revolution or feminism, look at South Korea. That’s a very unequal society—the worst gender-wage gap in the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]—nobody’s idea of a feminist place, and it has the lowest birth rate of all.

Rosin: Okay. So far people listening to this could be like, Great numbers, whatever. Like, we were above 2.0. Now we’re below 2.0. And yet, this is something that’s alarming to you, which is really important to understand because it is very not intuitive. I feel like many people alive now, they’re very conscious of what they think of as their carbon footprint and what they can do to reduce it—you know, drive less, fly less—and then the agonizing discussion very alive among the younger generations about not having kids. So let’s really understand why it’s a problem. Like, is that not a valid concern, the concern that a lot of people have in their heads?

Spears: Okay, so a few things to touch on there. One is exactly this difference between, you’re saying, 1.8 and 2.2 or something. We might not even see it, walking around in society. But that’s what would make the difference between population growth and population decline.

Now, I don’t want to—you said—see this as alarming. I think it’s important to be careful around that sort of language. We’re talking about a change that’s coming decades from now. The UN puts it in the 2080s, and I don’t think it helps anything to overstate the crisis or overstate the urgency. I think this is important to be talking about now because it’s going to be a big change and because nobody has all the answers yet. But I don’t want to, you know, call it a crisis in the way that people do when they say we shouldn’t be careful. I think just the opposite: What we need to do is be having a careful and thoughtful conversation about it.

But yes, having said that, I do think that we should be asking whether this future of depopulation, which is now the most likely future, is one that we should welcome or we should want something else instead.

Rosin: So you’re making the argument that we’re taking for granted that it’s fine, or we’re just walking blindly into a certain future, but we should actually think about it because this other future could be much better.

Spears: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.

Rosin: So why? Because, I mean, we’ll get to this in a moment, but I think you’re really going to have to convince people, and particularly women, for a lot of different reasons that we’ll get into. So what’s the strongest case for why this is a better future to have more people on Earth or a stable number of people on Earth?

Spears: Exactly. So is depopulation the best future? Depopulation, you know, generation after generation for the long-term future? The first thing to say is that the alternative to that doesn’t have to be unending population growth forever. You know, another alternative that we often overlook is population stabilization. And it could be stabilization at a level lower than today’s. So probably, no matter what we do now, the size of the world population is going to peak and begin to decline. The question is whether we would someday want that decline to stop, you know, maybe at 4 billion, maybe at 3 billion—I don’t know—maybe at 2 billion.

If we want any of those things, then in that future, we would need birth rates to rise back up to 2.0, and nobody really knows how to achieve that.

[Music]

Spears: Here’s one reason why depopulation matters and why we might want to avoid it and have stabilization instead: because we’re all made better off by sharing the world with more other people—other people alive alongside us and alive before us. One reason is that other people make the discoveries and have the ideas that improve our lives. Other people are where science and knowledge comes from.

Think about the world today compared to the world 50 years ago. Life expectancy is greater today in every country. Global poverty has declined by so much that the number of poor people have been falling, even as the size of populations has been growing. And all of these things have happened. We have more to eat. We have antibiotics. We have glasses to correct our vision, shorter workdays, better homes, more medicines and vaccines. We know how to farm more efficiently. We know how to organize a kindergarten, a cancer-drug trial, a parliamentary democracy. And humanity learned all of these things because of the people who came before us.

One reason that a stabilized future would be better than depopulation is that there’s still more progress to be done. Progress doesn’t happen automatically. We need people to get us there. And if we don’t have one another, if there’s not as many of us contributing and learning by doing, then we won’t make as fast progress in accumulating those things that could continue to make lives better, continue the fight against poverty, continue to figure out how to cure cancers that we can’t now cure.

Rosin: This is actually a quite beautiful notion of humanity or vision of humanity, just this idea that collective knowledge is a good; more of it is better. I think I’ve come to associate, particularly at this moment in time, you know, collective action as oppressive or—at least, I have a lot of examples of it now in my world, where masses of people getting together can also cause disinformation and push us backwards. And maybe that is just very present in our minds right now.

Spears: Yeah, I mean, it’s not the whole story. It’s not just about innovation. I think that there are other ways that strangers’ lives are not only good for them, but good for you. So, you know, here’s another way of looking at it: We’re used to thinking of other people as, potentially, rivals that consume the resources that we want, and part of what I’m trying to say is that we should think of other people as win-win.

Just like we reject that sort of zero-sum thinking in other ways and in international trade or immigration, all of us who are able to see other people as win-win in those ways should see other people as win-win here—because when other people want and need things that you want and need, they make it more likely that you’re going to get it.

So, I mean, where are you going to find a well-functioning public-transportation system—where there are more people, or where there are fewer people? Where are you going to find the special medical care that you might need for you or a loved one? How are we going to build a green-energy infrastructure? You are more likely to find it in a place where other people want and need the same thing.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: an impossible dilemma for some women, and what men can do about it.

[Break]

Rosin: Now I’d like to talk about the mechanics, like the on-the-ground mechanics: how you would do it, what the discussion would look like in its details. So if we start with the U.S., which we are the most familiar with, the drive for kids here is strongly, particularly now, associated with conservative politics nudging women into more traditional gender roles. What do you do about that? Like, having children’s been politicized the way so many things have been politicized in the U.S.

Spears: I think the first thing to do is to stand up and say, “That’s wrong.” It’s not surprising to hear that conservatives want to return to unequal gender roles or roll back the gender revolution. But I think it’s important for liberals not to accept that logic, the logic that halting or reversing the fertility decline has to make things worse for women, because what they’re doing is: They’re making an assumption there that raising the next generation is solely women’s responsibility—and it’s everybody’s responsibility.

And I think that gender inequality is what helped get us into this situation; it’s not going to be what gets us out. If more people all along had recognized that raising the next generation is something that all of us should do, that we shouldn’t have this wall between care work and “important work,” but in fact, we all have an interest in the next generation, that it’s not just women’s responsibility, I think—I’m not saying that everything would be perfect, but I think that we might not be in such a big problem.

So let’s be a little bit more precise. What about men, right? I mean, no doubt, the biology of human life is unequal, and the economics and culture of parenting are unequal. And, you know, reproduction will burden women in ways that it will not burden men, but that’s not the end of the sentence, because it takes more than nine months to make a new person. It takes many years of parenting and housework and effort of every kind. There’s plenty of time over the years and long nights for men to even things out, and we shouldn’t pretend that’s not possible or that we’re helpless against the status quo of inequality.

Rosin:  Why has that been so stubborn to change? I mean, that’s a million-dollar question. I mean, I actually did some research in South Korea, and in gender equality in South Korea. I wrote a chapter of my own book about this, and it was no mystery to me what was happening in South Korea, because the culture had not changed one bit in terms of expectations on women, in terms of what they have to put in for their children, put in for their in-laws, put in for the family, the sort of traditional gender expectations—while women had en masse entered the workforce and were working very long hours. And it truly, of all countries I’ve ever been to, just seemed impossible. Like, it seemed an impossible dilemma for women.

Spears: Right. Like, who’s surprised that women are looking at that and saying, “No, thank you”? We all have an interest in what sort of society we have and what sort of population we have, and if we’re heaping all of the burden on just some of us, then yeah—let’s not be surprised when they say, “No, thank you.”

Rosin: So what do you do then about the example of the Scandinavian countries, which do have quite a bit of gender equality, at least compared to the United States, which doesn’t even have, you know, mandated paid-family leave. And even in countries like that, they haven’t managed with all the policies and all the generous maternity leaves, and even piling on paternity leaves have not really managed to nudge that number up.

Spears: So I think there are a few things to think about there. One is that I bet if we went and we asked women in Sweden, they would tell us that there are still some notable imperfections there.

Two is that even if, just as a weird thought experiment, humans had been asexual, like a starfish or something, all along, and there just weren’t such things as men and women, we might still be facing a future of low birth rates because, you know, so much is changing. There are so many other opportunities for work, for education, for leisure that fewer people still might be choosing to have children.

So I don’t think there is one silver bullet for this whole explanation. I think it’s an important part of it and an important first step. But I think the third and the most important thing is that it’s not a short path out of this situation.

[Music]

Spears: It’s going to be something that happens over generations. I mean, right now, even in whatever you might consider to be the society that’s closest to what we would call ideal—and no one’s there yet—you still have people who are, you know, young people today in their 20s who grew up 10, 15, 20 years ago seeing their parents struggle to combine parenting with all of the other things they value, whatever that is for them, and go into adulthood with the expectation that Yeah, society isn’t going to support me. There are hard trade-offs here.

And so it’s an intergenerational thing, where maybe if we have a few generations of people growing up and seeing a society where parenting is fairer, parenting is more supported, you know, we make it easier for people to combine choosing parenting with choosing other things—whether for some people that’s work, for some people that’s friendship, for some people that’s rest, or whatever it is that matters to you.

Maybe we get a generation that sees that they talk to their kids differently. Their kids talk to their kids differently. And maybe on that time scale, we start to see people having a different idea of what might be possible for their lives, because we’ve proven it to them. But I think there’s some time; there’s some work to do proving it to people, and we’re nowhere near that yet.

Rosin:  I mean, as you’re talking, I’m remembering that when I had my first child and I was a full-time working person, I did have this profound sense, Oh, I’m alone here. I’m an inconvenience. There isn’t a system or a structure. Nobody’s gonna figure out anything for me. There’s no established pattern that I can walk into. This is all, like, an individual operation. And that’s very daunting.

Spears: I don’t know how old your kids are, but what if one day you tell that to them, right? And then they’re making their family decisions, having seen or heard about you going through that experience. Right? That’s why I think this is something that’s gonna have a long tail over time.

Rosin: Right. So what you’re trying to do is just (1) start the conversation and (2) not let the right hijack the conversation, which is very strongly what’s happening right now.

Spears: Right. And part of the problem is pretending that it’s a short-term policy solution, that we could pass a piece of legislation. I mean, I could tell you about pieces of legislation that I would like, and they’re not the ones that are getting passed, but that’s not the timescale we’re operating on.

I mean, if Kamala Harris had defeated Donald Trump, instead of the other way around, a lot would be better, you know, including, close to my heart, foreign aid. But I don’t think the birth rate is going to be any different at the end of four years, because it’s just not the sort of thing that, for all of the talk, short-term legislation is going to do anything about.

Rosin: Right. So let’s talk about what you’ve seen in doing this research. Have you ever seen any experiment anywhere in any country that was actually successful in increasing the birth rate?

Spears: I wish I could tell you something more optimistic, but no, at least not in the sort of long-term, sustained way that would bring it to the level that would stabilize the population. The Human Fertility Database records something called “completed cohort fertility,” which is how many children people have over the course of a lifetime. And that’s the sort of thing that matters here. You know, since 1950, in these data, there have been 26 countries where this lifetime average birth rate has fallen below 1.9, and in none of them has it ever gone back up to 2.0.

And that includes many countries where, you know, politicians will tell you that there are pronatalist programs in place to raise the birth rate. So there’s no evidence that anything like that will bring it back up. Whatever’s going to get us there is going to have to be something much newer.

I mean, I’m making the case, and in this book we’re making the case, that a stabilized future population would be better than global depopulation. And we also think that a stabilized population is compatible with commitments to environmental stewardship, reproductive freedom, and progressive priorities.

And so what we’re asking for right now is for other people to think so, to be part of this conversation, to be able to have people standing up and saying, Look—if somebody chooses to have no children or a few children, it’s not for anyone else to say whether they’re making a mistake, but all of us together are making a mistake when we make it hard for people to choose larger families or to have children.

[Music]

Spears: It’s not surprising that the right thinks that the solution here is traditionalism. But for too long, the left has sort of granted them that premise and said that there has to be a firewall between, on the one hand, caring about the future of the population and birth rates, or, on the other hand, being committed to reproductive freedom and the right to abortion and contraception and gender equity. And what we are here to say is that we care about both of these things, and we need to reject that split.

I think society is at the beginning of facing up to this challenge. It’s been happening for a long time, but we’ve only been talking about it recently. And so most people haven’t yet come to terms with what we’re facing. Now, we wouldn’t have written this book calling to avoid depopulation if we didn’t think it were possible to change course. You know, we think it’s possible. But, you know, right now, jumping to a policy solution is probably the wrong move, and that’s what we hear people talking about. This isn’t something that’s going to be turned around in one presidential term. I think the next step is for more people to share a belief that we should want something to change, that that’s a necessary precursor, but there are a lot of minds to change first.

Rosin: Well, Dean, thank you so much for laying out the argument for us.

Spears: Thank you so much for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and Kevin Townsend. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Luis Parrales. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Talk to you next week.