Why Should We Worry About Declining Birth Rates?
Declining birth rates around the world may pose new challenges for humanity. A new book on the topic by Elon Musk–funded economists indulges in questionable philosophy and sci-fi speculation that fails to shed much light on this important topic.
Elon Musk holds one of his children after a delivering a speech in Miami Beach, Florida, on April 18, 2023. (Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images)
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Review of After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso (Simon & Schuster, 2025).
Concern about the ongoing decline in birth rates around the world has recently transformed from an arcane demographic preoccupation into a marquee political controversy. Many were indignant when it was revealed that the Trump administration was considering a variety of dubious measures to increase birth rates, from national medals for motherhood to barring Fulbright scholarships to the childless to small subsidies for new mothers (a “pro-family” “Trump accounts” scheme eventually made its way into the Big Beautiful Bill). Alongside the right-wing conferences convened to promote pronatalism, a flurry of articles and books have appeared debating the most efficacious way to reverse the downward trajectory of fertility rates, which are now at their lowest rate ever in the United States.
The latest entry in this genre, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, significantly raises the stakes by insisting that falling fertility rates are a threat to the existence of human civilization itself. “Humanity is on a path to depopulation,” the opening line declares. In a matter of decades, homo sapiens will be on the back end of the “spike” in global human population that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, the authors predict, imperiling the fate of the species.
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