Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Michael Geruso, Associate Professor of Economics at University of Texas, Austin in conversation with Phillip Levine, Katharine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, on his forthcoming book co-authored with economist Dean Spears, "After the Spike: Population Progress and the Case for Humanity (Simon and Schuster, 2025).
Introduced by Liza Oliver, Director of the Pluralism Initiative and Associate Professor of Art History.
About the book:
Soon the global population will peak and begin its fall. 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 readers 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. To the contrary, so much of the progress that we now take for granted sprang up in a large and interconnected society. That is no coincidence. Improvements and better lives don’t come automatically, simply because time marches forward. People have to achieve them.
In After the Spike, economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso sound the wakeup call and shed new light on what a future of sustained low birth rates would mean. They go beyond worries over funding pensions and finding workers and explain how broad-based technological and social progress may be threatened. More than an assembly of the most important facts, After the Spike is a rallying call to action to reverse course.
Michael Geruso, Associate Professor of Economics at University of Texas, Austin in conversation with Phillip Levine, Katharine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, on his forthcoming book co-authored with economist Dean Spears, "After the Spike: Population Progress and the Case for Humanity (Simon and Schuster, 2025).
Introduced by Liza Oliver, Director of the Pluralism Initiative and Associate Professor of Art History.
About the book:
Soon the global population will peak and begin its fall. 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 readers 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. To the contrary, so much of the progress that we now take for granted sprang up in a large and interconnected society. That is no coincidence. Improvements and better lives don’t come automatically, simply because time marches forward. People have to achieve them.
In After the Spike, economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso sound the wakeup call and shed new light on what a future of sustained low birth rates would mean. They go beyond worries over funding pensions and finding workers and explain how broad-based technological and social progress may be threatened. More than an assembly of the most important facts, After the Spike is a rallying call to action to reverse course.
