Dean Spears & Michael Geruso on Why We Need More People

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. And now the good fight. with Yasha Monk.

From Thomas Malthews to Paul Ehrlich, there has long been deep concern that we may be facing a crisis of overpopulation, but 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 well-informed, high-level conversation that explores 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?

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