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.
When republicans are using the same exact language along with christian fascism to justify banning abortion your damn right it's political. People also aren't not having children as some sort of noble self sacrifice you dipshit we can't afford to have kids if we want to. If the population does plummet that much in 60 years it would be because you ghouls are killing us, starving us, and destroying the planet.
I fucking hate Dean Spears so much. Someone should throw him in a swamp in the everglades and film him getting ripped apart by alligators.
Referring to the intentional decision to not reproduce as "the ultimate personal sacrifice" is so aggressively heterosexual and patriarchal. So like, does that mean that I am damned to live a pitiful, empty life because of my infertility? What about gay couples? Orphaned children and the adoption thereof are never mentioned once in the entire article and the challenges of parenting are only briefly touched on, so its not about the experience of raising children, its about producing more humans. The interview sucked and the author's point was that declining birth rates are bad because of a bunch of nonsense reasons like the potential extinction of humanity. They offer no concrete solutions. Its white supremacist anxieties mixed with a breeding fetish dressed up as erudite concerns about economies and quality of life.
This segment about 2/3rds in is pretty illustrative of how utterly detached these people are:
[Spears makes an argument that population growth is a primary driver behind scientific progress and improved quality of life]
Rosin (the interviewer): 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 (the interviewee): 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.