Welcome to Entanglements. In this episode, hosts Brooke Borel and Anna Rothschild ask: Is there a population crisis? Politicians and influencers are pushing that idea, but researchers debate whether our global population will truly decline to the point of “crisis.”
Their guests this week are Michael Geruso, an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Jennifer Dowd, a professor of demography and population health at the University of Oxford.
Below is the full transcript of the podcast, lightly edited for clarity. You can also subscribe to Entanglements on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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Elon Musk: I do want to sort of once again emphasize the importance of having enough children to sustain our numbers, and not. Plummet into population collapse, which is currently happening.
Anna Rothschild: Brooke, what is this?
Brooke Borel: It’s Elon Musk talking about the demise of humanity.
Anna Rothschild: Hmm.
Elon Musk: Population collapse is a real and current thing. The only reason it’s not being reflected in the total population numbers is that as much is because people are living longer.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, it’s dramatic but it is a popular take right now — that we are in a population crisis. Globally, the human population could peak as soon as the 2080s, and if birth rates continue to decline, that could eventually mean far fewer people on the planet.
Anna Rothschild: Is such a bad thing though? I find it hard to believe, first of all, that we’re on the brink of population collapse, and second of all that that would mean the collapse of society. How bad would that really be?
Brooke Borel: And that’s exactly what we’re going to get into today.
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Brooke Borel: You’re listening to Entanglements. I’m Brooke Borel, articles editor at Undark Magazine.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m science journalist Anna Rothchild. So Brooke, I feel like not that long ago, we were all worried about the opposite thing. We were worried about the human population exploding.
Brooke Borel: Yes, you’re right. It’s a view that’s been around for a long time, but you might be thinking specifically of “The Population Bomb.”
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, that was a book, right?
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: And, and it said that basically the world’s population was going to explode and then we are all going to starve.
Brooke Borel: Yes. That could be the extremely abridged cliff notes. So that book was written by a biologist named Paul Ehrlich. He published it in the late 1960s. And you know, think about the context. When it came out, the U.S. population had almost doubled over the previous 60 years. We were coming off of a surge in the fertility rate during the baby boom, which started after World War II and ended in the mid sixties. And because of the growing population, Ehrlich thought we’d be unable to feed everyone by the 1970s or 1980s.
Anna Rothschild: But that’s clearly not what happened, right? There have of course been famines since then, but not on a global level like he was describing.
Brooke Borel: Right. And now our population is still rising, but each generation is having fewer babies. And that’s the thing that’s getting a lot of attention right now. So on average, across the population, women need to have 2.1 kids in order to replace both parents in that population, right?
Anna Rothschild: Right.
Brooke Borel: And by the way, I’m using the word woman here because that’s what’s typically used in the literature. Anyway, here in the U.S. the current rate is more like 1.6.
Anna Rothschild: Right. And I know we’re not an outlier.
Brooke Borel: No, this is happening in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, China, Europe as a whole, Russia, Iran, Tunisia, Turkey, Sri Lanka, and many more places. And so it’s not just the western world or just secular places. It’s not everywhere, but it’s pretty widespread. And although we do see some blips, like the baby boom, the trend has largely been downwards.
Anna Rothschild: So are we actually below the replacement level now?
Brooke Borel: No. Globally it’s more like 2.2 kids per woman.
Anna Rothschild: OK. And that’s why the pronatalists are pushing everyone to have more babies.
Brooke Borel: Yes. And Elon Musk certainly takes that view, right? That pronatalist view. And we’re also seeing a lot of rhetoric amongst politicians and influencers and other people promoting this idea that we need to be encouraging people to have more kids. They say it’s important for our society and culture and the economy. And RFK Jr. has even called the current fertility rates a threat to national security.
Anna Rothschild: Are they?
Brooke Borel: Well, I’m skeptical. So with all that in mind, the question of the day is: Is there actually a population crisis?
Anna Rothschild: I’m super curious to find out.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. So to dig into that question, I talked to two experts in demography who have very different perspectives.
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Brooke Narration: So the question of the day is, is there a population crisis?
Michael Geruso: I wouldn’t say there’s a population crisis, but there is a big problem for our future that we should be thinking seriously about now.
Brooke Borel: This is Michael Geruso. He’s an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and is a faculty scholar at the school’s Population Research Center. A lot of his work has been in demography, which is the study of human populations, so he’s looking at births, deaths, migration, and so on to understand how these populations change over time. He’s also the co-author of the recent book “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People.” So there are all sorts of theories as to what’s causing lower birth rates. Here’s what Mike thinks is the culprit.
Michael Geruso: I think there is a sort of a simple explanation, but it’s not going to be satisfying. The simple explanation is that people want fewer children today than people did in the past. And that might sound tautological, but it really does rule out some things. So, for example, one of the things that it rules out is the idea that people are having fewer children today because of the availability of contraception. That’s not why people are having fewer children today. Birth rates were falling before the invention of modern contraception. They’ve continued falling after contraception was very widespread and available. So for example, in Sweden, fertility rates fell since 2015 from 1.9 to 1.4. That wasn’t because contraception became newly available to populations of Swedish women.
So at a fundamental level, this is about what people want and aspire to in their lives. It’s not about infertility, it’s not about access to contraception, it’s about the kind of lives people want to build for themselves.
Brooke Borel: So when you and your colleagues consider this to be a big problem, what are the main things that you think are at stake?
Michael Geruso: Yeah, so one thing that’s at stake is people’s lives. It can be pretty easy to talk about population and miss the fact that population is people, that when we talk about the difference between a future of a global population of 10 billion or 8 billion or 6 billion, those feel like numbers, but behind each individual in those huge numbers is an actual person’s life. And so one of the reasons that depopulation would matter is that people’s lives matter. And I know it could be a hard thing to kind of get your head around, you know, what does it matter if a billion people live or an extra person lives? But my view is it just really can’t be the case that it accounts for nothing.
I know for sure that people are not going to be immediately convinced by that. Let’s say that all you care about is the quality of life and not the quantity of life — even if that’s your view, there are still a few big reasons that you should care about a depopulating future.
Brooke Borel: And what are those?
Michael Geruso: So other people on the planet make life better for each of us. We’re lucky to get to live in a big world. We’re lucky to get to live at a time when many other people have come before us. And that’s because living in a big world incentivizes progress. I think it’s very easy for people to fall into the fallacy of zero sum thinking when it comes to population, so that if someone else, or a million other someone elses, are on the planet, then they’re consuming resources, taking something away from what I or my group might have access to. But the truth of the history and economics of population size is that it’s just the opposite. When other people need and want things, they make it more likely, not less likely that you get what you need and want.
Brooke Borel: Mike went on to give several examples. So if you live in a big city compared to a rural area, you might have more options when it comes to medical care. You might have more access to the arts, like a great museum or a concert venue, and you usually have better public transportation.
Michael Geruso: So the cities are just a metaphor, but the same idea is true on a global scale. Some things can’t happen or won’t happen if they can’t reach a sufficient scale.
Brooke Borel: What kind of things?
Michael Geruso: If for example you want next generation battery technology to sort power a clean energy revolution, or if you want a cure for a disease or a new vaccine or even if what you want is just like a great high budget television series — those things are only going to happen if there are a sufficient number of other people who want the same thing. No one’s going to make a TV show just for me or you. No one’s going to make a vaccine just for me or you.
Brooke Borel: And when we talk about depopulation becoming perhaps a problem, how far in the future are we talking about that?
Michael Geruso: Yeah. I think the way to think about it is that depopulation could have a speed that was roughly equal to the up slope of the surge in population over the last century. So a hundred years ago, 1925, there were 2 billion people on the planet. Since then, the population has quadrupled and in a world that starts depopulating, the down slope could be just as fast as the up slope. To give a sense of that, we’re going to take a total fertility rate of one. We’re going to choose one because it makes the math really easy and we can do it in our heads.
So that means that for every two adults, there’s one child. For every one woman, there’s one child. And so if you were to start with a grandparent’s generation of a hundred people, then in the second generation there would be 50 people. In the third generation, there’d be 25 people because for every two adults in each generation, there’s one child in the next. And so what that would mean is that over the course of 60 or 70 years, these generation sizes are shrinking by 75 percent.
It’s exponential decline. And it doesn’t require birth rates to keep dropping. Birth rates could stay steady at where they are today in many places in the world, and that would lead to exponential, indefinite population decline.
Anna Rothschild: OK, so I hear what he’s saying about how smaller populations have less progress and just less abundance overall, whether we’re talking about healthcare resources or new TV shows. But I guess there’s still a part of me that feels like fewer people on the planet would still be a good thing or could still be a good thing, at least for the planet itself and all of the species that live here, since we’re doing a pretty bad job taking care of them, you know?
Brooke Borel: Yeah. And that’s something Mike hears a lot.
Michael Geruso: So I certainly understand where people with that perspective are coming from. But I think that there’s an important thing that’s being missed in those conversations, which is timing. Population is a big ship, slow to turn. And so, if we think about a population globally that’s going to keep rising for the next few decades and then peak sometime in the 2080s and then start falling, that timeline is just completely incompatible with thinking that depopulation is going to rescue us from our needs and commitments to actually address climate change.
I think we also need to grapple with how environmental progress has actually been made in the past, and it’s never been made by reducing the number of people. It’s always been about changing the activities that people do. And there’s an analogy I like to use here that helps me think about this in perspective, which is thinking back to the 1960s and seventies when there was a huge environmental problem with burning leaded gasoline. And the way we got out of that environmental disaster was by passing the Clean Air Act of 1970 and then various amendments to it so that we weren’t burning leaded gasoline anymore. But just imagine if the solution that someone had proposed in 1970 was not to take the lead out of gasoline, but instead to just have fewer drivers in America. We would be nowhere on solving that problem.
So it just really — even though it might feel sort of karmically just to think that somehow fewer people on the planet are going to be a solution to these problems — it’s just not, the timing doesn’t work out.
Brooke Borel: You might think this means Mike is a pronatalist, but that’s not quite true.
Michael Geruso: I generally don’t think about myself as a pronatalist just because in the U.S. in 2025, that tends to convey some sort of ideological commitment to a very particular idea of what a family is, or what the role for women and men in society are.
Brooke Borel: So that’s a label that you wouldn’t want to adopt, but in terms of depopulation being a problem and wanting to find a way to avoid that, that’s where that might align.
Michael Geruso: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I think we should work and learn to try to avoid depopulation. You know, global depopulation isn’t going to start for 50 years, maybe. We have this time to learn. We have this time to invest in research. We have this time to invest in awareness building. Because I really don’t think that we’re really even going to scratch the surface of what I think is a big problem for our future if there isn’t a broad public consensus that it’s something that we should care about.
Anna Rothschild: OK. He brings up some interesting points. I’m still not totally sold that decreasing our population would be such a bad thing, or at least that it’s a problem we can’t solve by making changes to our society and social safety nets and stuff like that. But I can see why he’s sounding the alarm now.
Brooke Borel: Yes, for sure. But my next guest is with you. She’s familiar with the same trends Mike talked about, but she’s not nearly as concerned about where we’re headed.
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Jennifer Dowd: I don’t think the prospects of population decline are a problem that we should be concerned with. We are not on the verge of population decline or population collapse, even though I feel like the media sometimes has people believing that we’re already on the road to extinction.
Brooke Borel: This is Jennifer Dowd. She’s a professor of demography and population health at the University of Oxford.
Jennifer Dowd: The idea that we will peak, later in the century, globally with population is based on population projections, our kind of best guesses, extrapolating rates forward. And I think that’s realistic that we are seeing slower growth around the world and we likely will reach a peak this century and then start to decline.
And, and the question is really: Will that decline be more like a plateau and stabilization? Will it be a slow decline that takes hundreds of years and might then change again? And that’s something that’s actually quite far into the future and I think difficult for us to make accurate predictions about.
Brooke Borel: And why is that difficult to project so far into the future?
Jennifer Dowd: Well, I think, demography is kind of like the stock market or the weather or sports games. We don’t have a crystal ball, so we can do the math of making assumptions about the future. And, we’re quite good at doing that for maybe the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years because what happened last year is a pretty good indicator of what’s going to happen one year from now.
And we also know how many people are alive today and so how many people could potentially have babies in the next 20 to 40 years. But the farther that we go out, we’re making really big assumptions about basic human behaviors like fertility, and even about things like mortality and how long people will live.
Brooke Narration: So Anna, as far as Jenn is concerned, it’s just too soon to say that there even will be a drastic population drop or that birth rates will stay low for a long
Anna Rothschild: But say it does happen. Would that concern her?
Brooke Borel: Not so much actually.
Jennifer Dowd: I guess I will say that you can have this conversation at different levels — kind of thinking about global population or U.S. You know, I definitely want to acknowledge that certain countries have seen much more rapid fertility declines that have already been happening for decades.
So South Korea right now is seeing total fertility rates that are less than one, I think. And you know, those are numbers that if they’re sustained, which is always the question, would lead to very rapid population change. And again, I think we shouldn’t downplay the implications of that in particular contexts, but if you zoom out, it is something that human societies have kind of always adapted to. Some of these projections that are looking forward to peak population and decline, if you look a couple hundred years out, we’re still kind of at the population size that we were in 1990, and it depends on the assumptions you make about how fast we might decline, but I don’t think we pictured a world in 1990 as having too few people.
Brooke Narration: Jenn also addressed something that comes up a lot when we talk about depopulation: How to deal with uneven age groups. For instance, if you have a lot of people who are aging and need care, but not enough younger people to take care of them, what do you do?
Jennifer Dowd: We should think about how we can support people who obviously want to age in place in the places they’ve been that are depopulating. It has lots of implications for infrastructure, and how we organize our societies. But I think they’re going to be manageable challenges, and often it is this type of change — demographic or technological or economic change — that spurs us to innovate and adapt in ways that maybe we can’t predict right now.
Brooke Borel: And when people do frame this as a crisis, what’s wrong with that? What do you think is at stake?
Jennifer Dowd: Well, I think a couple things. I think it’s overstating the magnitude and the speed at which birth rates, and thus population size, will be changing. And then I think kind of whipping people up into a crisis mindset does have the potential to incentivize policies that might take more aggressive actions. And I think as we all know, in the area of fertility and human reproduction, when those things become policy targets, there’s often a lot of bad things that can happen.
Brooke Narration: Jenn went on to mention policies like coerced or forced sterilization or the one child policy in China. And framing the current population trends as a crisis can also lead to, say, promoting more traditional gender roles so that women can hypothetically have more kids, or rolling back access to contraception or abortion.
Brooke Borel: So in terms of thinking about whether it’s a population crisis or a problem or whatever, what do you think would be a better framing for having these conversations?
Jennifer Dowd: For me a better question would be: What can we do to make parenting easier for people who want to have children? We still see in survey data from the U.S. that intentions or desires for around two children have remained pretty steady over time. But there does seem to be an increasing gap between people’s desire for kids and feeling like it’s the right time or that they’re able to do it at the moment that they want to.
Anna Rothschild: So when she talks about making parenting easier, she’s referring to things like affordable housing, access to IVF, and better social support for families. So they can have children if they want to when they want to. I mean, even if that doesn’t lead to a lot more babies, that just sounds like a win-win.
Brooke Borel: Totally.
Anna Rothschild: So going back to the question of whether or not we have a population crisis, or a population problem if you’d rather call it that, it sounds to me like Jenn and Mike actually disagree on two different points. First of all, they disagree about whether or not our population is about to plunge dramatically at all. But then they also disagree about how bad it would even be if it happens. Is that right?
Brooke Borel: Exactly. And we got into all of that when I brought the two of them together.
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Jennifer Dowd: Hi, Mike.
Michael Geruso: Hi. Nice to meet
Jennifer Dowd: Good to meet you.
Brooke Borel: We started with their first point of disagreement, what kind of population decline is even coming? Is it definitely a steep drop off or could it be a slower decline that may actually then even out?
Jennifer Dowd: I guess for myself, looking back a hundred years or more at where we thought human population was going, and birth rates, we haven’t been that good at projecting what we think the trends will be or anticipating major shifts in birth rates or migration or mortality. So, I guess my concern is that calling this an urgent thing for people today to focus on perhaps doesn’t give enough credit to how much things might change by the time this demographic change plays out, which still takes generations.
And if we’re taking that very long run view of “birth rates have to come up at some point to stabilize the population,” again, I guess I don’t disagree with that mathematically, I just don’t think there’s an inevitability about it staying at any level that we predict right now with our mathematical models.
Michael Geruso: Yeah, a few responses. There were a few things there. First, I certainly don’t think that any particular future is inevitable. I’m not here to say that over the long run global fertility rates will converge to a number like 1.8 or 1.6 or 1.4. I think of this as a risk. I think it’s more likely than not that fertility will stay at low replacement for a very long time. But I wouldn’t be advocating about this if I thought it weren’t changeable. So I think of long-term low fertility as a risk, not a certainty or an inevitability.
I would challenge the idea that this is some sort of new phenomenon under the sun. Yes, we had a mid-20th century baby boom. That was a blip in human history. Before then birth rates were falling; after then birth rates were falling. For as long back as we have good records, birth rates have been falling. So this is a very long run trend.
Jennifer Dowd: I appreciate that. In the long view, certainly, there has been a broad trend towards fertility decline. But I think it’s a little difficult to draw parallels between changes that were happening hundreds of years ago in a very different mortality context, very different, economic context. So I guess I would reframe this new kind of era of low fertility is new in this modern sense of when women do have access to contraception and more options to control their fertility and economic opportunities. So I feel like this era of people having more control and choice over their fertility decisions is still relatively new in the scope of human history. And that’s why I just continue to have a little humility about the idea that we know where this is going in the future.
Brooke Borel: And going back to your differing views on the severity of the issue, the problem right now, if we want to call it a problem, both for yourselves and also for the field more broadly, is it a matter of looking at the same sets of data more or less and just having different interpretations of it, or are there different sort of data sets out there that people prefer for one reason or another? Or is it a combination of these things?
Michael Geruso: I am not sure that we are seeing anything different in the data, so far as data exists. I don’t think it’s much of a matter of dispute what fertility rates are today. I don’t think it’s much of a matter of dispute of what they were a decade or 50 years ago or 75 years ago, within some reasonable confidence interval.
We do seem to have a real important difference of opinion and difference of evaluation in what the chances are of fertility staying low enough for long enough to really bind and matter, but I’m actually not even sure about that. I mean, I guess the question that I would ask Jennifer is: Do you think there’s not an importantly-sized chance — 50 percent, 25 percent, 10 percent, 5 percent — that fertility stays substantially below the replacement level past the end of this century, into the next century? Do you really think that’s not a substantial risk in the statistical sense?
Jennifer Dowd: That’s a great question to try to put a probability on it. I guess I would say just to your first point, we are looking at the same data, but I still think we’re drawing somewhat different conclusions about the certainty and speed of the fertility trajectories that we’re on.
Do I think there’s a 10 percent chance of below replacement fertility through the end of the century? I think I might agree with that. But I guess where I still differ is thinking that that would be a very permanent state of the world. I just feel like the farther we get out, it really just does not make sense to project these things. We can do it as a thought exercise and we can do that math of what that line will look like. But I think if we look across human populations, it hasn’t actually ever been steady lines. So I guess I just have no confidence in my ability to think 200 years ahead in ways that should inform the way people behave today, which is kind of the important thing.
It’s kind of what are the — what’s the call to action or takeaway for us today, other than trying to build a world that’s the best world we can create that makes people feel comfortable and want to have children? Which I think we can all agree on. So I guess it’s a question of framing: What is the call to action if we do think there’s even a small chance of population decline a hundred years from now?
Michael Geruso: I mean, I think this probability is much higher than 10 percent. But even if you only thought it was 10 percent, imagine that we thought there was a 10 percent chance of another pandemic like Covid-19 by the end of the century. I would want people working on that issue. I’d want people working on responses and mitigation techniques now and not waiting for that risk to actually be realized.
Jennifer Dowd: I don’t see that as the same thing at all because I don’t necessarily see population decline as a problem, per se. It’s population change and I think we need to plan to adapt to that. But having population or birth rates as a target in and of itself, I would not agree that that’s a productive way to kind of anticipate that change.
Michael Geruso: I think that anything that affects the wellbeing of people around the world is something that matters. And it’s something that is permissible to have a public policy and a broader social conversation about, and birth rates are one of the things that affect the wellbeing of people everywhere.
Brooke Borel: Let’s talk a little bit more about that. In our one-on-one conversation you used the analogy of a bigger global population to being like having a big city — you have more resources, you have more, sort of a concentration of population, so there’s usually more funding for the arts, there’s more all that stuff.
Can you talk more about some of the examples of things that could be lost if the world itself is smaller? And then I’m curious to hear your thoughts, Jen. Is this something that you also would be concerned about?
Michael Geruso: Yeah, at the highest level, we live better lives today, less precarious, more educated, healthier, longer, safer than people in the past. Not because we have more grit or intelligence or moral integrity. It’s because we get to enjoy the progress that other people have made. It’s because we get to benefit from living in a big world where lots of people provide the things that we enjoy and we should want to pass on those benefits and continued progress to future generations. Part of that is that over time, living standards are improved because people keep adding to our stock of knowledge and creativity that’s shared across the world. So it’s easier to think about examples from the past because it’s going to be difficult to talk about any inventions that have not yet been invented.
But if you look backwards, once humanity breeds some new disease resistant variety of wheat, or discovers soap or penicillin to reduce infections or learns to efficiently harness solar power or wind power into electricity or develop next generation batteries, other people can put those good ideas to use over and over and over again and further improve them.
And every time we use those ideas, they’re not diminished. That makes lives better for each of us. And you know, in terms of the size of the world mattering, there are some niche things that happen in a big world that just can’t happen in a small world, because there’s less people specializing. There are some things that only happen when lots of people want the same thing. That’s true at the microcosm of a city. It’s also true on the sort of macro scale of the world as a whole.
Jennifer Dowd: Yeah, I would say I don’t disagree with the broad strokes of that. Obviously people are necessary for innovation and growth, but I see a lot of scope for kind of adaptation and compensation, for investing more in the people we have, for institutions and incentives to help drive innovation. And I think it’s one of those things that maybe we lack imagination about what that looks like in the future, but it’s not a one for one — that more people are necessary for progress. And the idea about concentration and places where we can generate art and good restaurants bringing people together — I think there’s also still a lot of scope for that even if the population stayed the same or declined.
And there’s no reason to believe that we couldn’t continue to benefit from bringing people together, into more concentrated urban areas. So again, I see this as something that plays out over a long period of time and probably has a lot more nuance and countervailing things working with it.
Michael Geruso: Thanks for saying that. I don’t really disagree. Many things matter all at once. To say that population size matters doesn’t deny that human capital investment — so investing in children’s health and education, or the quality of institutions and the rule of law — matters. All these things matter all at once, but over a long enough run, population size will bind. A 1 billion person economy just will not produce as much innovation or good stuff for people to enjoy as an 8 billion person economy.
Even if a hundred percent of people in that 1 billion person economy are laser focused on that, and only 2 billion people, that 8 billion person economy is focused on that. So yes, all of these things matter. But to say that many things matter is not to deny that population size is one of the things that matters.
Jennifer Dowd: Oh, no, I agree with that, but I think I disagree that we know with great certainty that it’s impossible for that 1 billion size population to generate the innovation of a different version of a population that’s 8 billion people. So I think that’s where we disagree.
Brooke Borel: That was a question I had. There are other problems that we say we could engineer our way out of them, right? Is a growing population the only answer to this? Or can we engineer our way out of it in some way? Well, we just have AI taking care of so many of these…?
Jennifer Dowd: That’s one possibility of something that could compensate. But again, I feel like I want to have some humility about imagining what that world looks like. But certainly, there are many things that could compensate for fewer people. All those things matter, but the degree to which they matter and the certainty with which, more people equals more innovation, I think is a little bit more questioned than you might suggest.
Brooke Borel: What did you think of this conversation? How are you feeling as we’re wrapping up?
Jennifer Dowd: Oh, really good. No, I enjoyed it.
Michael Geruso: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that I hope for is that there is a broader conversation about low fertility. This is a conversation that’s opened up to people with a broad range of policy, social value commitments, and I think this is an important step in that.
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Brooke Borel: So Anna, how are you now feeling about the prospect of depopulation?
Anna Rothschild: I guess I’m feeling like I understand a little bit better why some people are worried about it and I, and I see that Mike is operating in good faith. Like he is legitimately concerned about what might happen in the future.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: Which I will say before this interview, I kind of thought people who talked about the so-called population crisis were really just trying to turn us all into trad wives. And that’s definitely not what Mike is doing. And so that was a nice thing for me to see as somebody who came in as a bit of a skeptic.
Brooke Borel: Right. And there is some nuance here because a lot of politicians and influencers are latching onto this framing of a crisis and then using that as an excuse to promote specific values or worldviews. Which can include traditional gender roles, including the trad wife on Instagram, having five kids and staying home and making homemade fruit loops for whatever for them all day.
Anna Rothschild: Right. Sacrificing her own career, her own desires.
Brooke Borel Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: Right. So it was helpful to hear from Mike what the legitimate concerns are.
Brooke Borel: What did you think about this idea that more people on the planet, that that just means it’s better for everyone?
Anna Rothschild: I mean, I get his point, right. I live in New York City. I live here in large part because it’s a bustling city with great restaurants, great transportation, like great art, culture.
Brooke Borel: Everything! I used to live there too. I still go down there because I live a couple hours away. I will go all the way down there for healthcare in some cases.
Anna Rothschild: Exactly. That being said, I am a little bit skeptical of the idea that even more people on this planet would necessarily be better. When I was a kid in the nineties, we had something like five to 6 billion people on the planet, something like that. And the world seemed OK. I mean, I am so aware that there were huge problems happening in the world in the nineties. The nineties were not a good time.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: There are a lot of bad things that are happening now too. And maybe arguably because the world is denser, like I’m totally speculating here, but would Covid have happened in the same way if people weren’t so packed together? If we didn’t have so many people on this planet, traveling and living together? Anyway, I’m obviously speculating here. I just don’t think we have some imperative to keep growing our population to try to max out those benefits. If our population had plateaued in the nineties, I don’t feel convinced that people would have generally become worse off now than they are now.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, totally.
Anna Rothschild: What about you? What did think of this coming in and where are you now?
Brooke Borel: I mean, coming into this, I was hearing a lot of talk about the so-called population crisis, and I felt sort of skeptical of that word crisis in general. Partly, I guess, because when something has such a long lead time, it’s hard to think of it as a crisis in the moment. So anyway, I was happy to hear both Mike and Jenn reframe this as definitely not a crisis, at least not today.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, me too.
Brooke Borel: And how am I feeling now? I mean, I guess I do have faith that even if we had smaller populations on this planet — we’re an innovative species. You know, I think any population swing is going to come with challenges, and I think Mike is right that it’s worth thinking about it now. But my gut feeling is that it’s something we can probably figure out without necessarily having to keep our population high or growing.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. I have a lot of faith in humanity. Specifically in that way.
Brooke Borel: Yes. Maybe not in all ways
Anna Rothschild: But it that way.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. Listeners, how do you feel about falling birth rates and population decline? Let us know.
Anna Rothschild: Send us an email at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you.
Brooke Borel: And that’s it for this episode of “Entanglements,” brought to you by Undark Magazine, which is published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. Our amazing producer and editor is Samia Bouzid. The show is fact-checked by Undark deputy editor Jane Reza. Our production editor is Amanda Grennell. Adriana Lacy is our audience engagement editor. Special thanks to our editor-in-chief, Tom Zeller Jr. I’m Brooke Borel.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m Anna Rothschild. Thanks for listening. See you next time.