After the Spike Quotes

“In no case is there evidence that more support for parents predicts more births. Not for parental leave, not for preschool enrollment, not for preschool or childcare affordability. Of nineteen countries where childcare is less costly than in the United States (after subsidies), fifteen have lower birth rates and the sixteenth, Sweden, matches the United States. All of the countries in this database have more paid, job-protected maternity leave than the United States, which offers no paid leave at all as a matter of national law. But of these twenty-two countries, each with better maternity leave, all but three have lower birth rates than the United States.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“In decades and centuries past, there was less to lose by spending time on children. The opportunity costs of parenting today include vacations, restaurant meals, quality time with a partner, streaming any good song or movie ever made, and just hanging out while the dishwasher and laundry machines do their things. Running shoes are better than they used to be, so professors in their forties can squeeze more years out of their knees. (Medicine, including artificial joints, is better, too, so they can squeeze more knees out of their years, if it comes to it.)”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“However hard someone is willing to work at their career, however dedicated they are to some personal project or some friendship, if they’re getting kids dressed and packing lunches, or doing drop-off and pickup, or handling bath time and bedtime and wake-up time (and wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night time), or just being home on a kid’s sick day or a school holiday, then there are fewer hours and less energy left to devote to the other things they care about.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Any government or politician that chose the splendid plan to raise birth rates would be working on behalf of future people, not meeting the needs of today’s voters. The politician’s perspective would have to extend beyond the next election, or even beyond the next decade or two, because their splendid plan would cost money and deepen any budget problem for the first few decades. “What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Phasing in beginning thirty years from now!”… is not an effective campaign slogan. And perhaps as bad, that splendid plan would be spending money and effort in part to help people outside of the government’s constituency, because progress and innovation shine across national borders.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Fertility techno-optimism has no answer to why people would start choosing children again, instead of all the wonderful competing goals and options that a whiz-bang new world would offer us.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Questions about values—questions beyond the graphs and numbers—surface whenever someone asks about the long-term future of the human population. Climate scholars and activists raise them. Our university colleagues raise them. The readers of our op-ed raised them. They can’t be settled by presentations of statistical facts. But they can’t be avoided in any honest and complete assessment of stabilization versus depopulation.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“But we can know this: Maybe we will someday face a threat that we could better surmount if there were more of us to contribute.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“So to understand this consequence of depopulation, we need to step back from our experiences as consumers of things and ask why innovation happens—electric vehicles, plant-based meats, a cochlear implant. Once invented, these get mass-produced because enough someones out there want them. But these technologies cost a lot to develop. That’s above and beyond dishing out bowls of a tried-and-true recipe. Humanity can only afford the up-front investment in all that engineering and refining because it can eventually be spread across many buyers.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“People choose one another. The rent is so damn high, in part, because other humans are so damn valuable. We pay just to be near them.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Strength is in our numbers, not just our rare luminaries. Non-rival innovation is so powerful that even without outliers—even in an alternative universe in which everyone was equally (unexceptionally) intelligent, adventurous, creative, kind, and organized—progress would depend on population size.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Because people create ideas, fewer useful ideas will be created in a depopulating future than on a stabilized path. Economists are famous for disagreeing with one another. Not here. As Michael Peters of Yale wrote in the opening sentence of a recent article in one of the economics profession’s leading journals: “Virtually all theories of economic growth predict a positive relationship between population size and productivity.” More people mean more ideas generated and shared more widely, benefiting each of us.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“A fact about facts: Facts don’t get used up, but they might go undiscovered.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“The second step is recognizing that people discover ideas. People create inventions. People make things better, in ways large (a new vaccine against tropical diseases) and small (a better cup of coffee). Economists call this “endogenous economic growth.” Endogenous means “created from the inside.” Ideas do not come from outside the economy. They come from us. The activities that people do inside an economy make the ideas that propel the economy forward.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“The fact that ideas, processes, formulas, and knowledge are all non-rival is, to use more economic jargon, a really big deal. Economics is supposed to be about scarcity, but here in the engine room we’ve found a fuel that never gets used up. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. It is the deep reason why more for somebody doesn’t have to mean less for somebody else. So the first step toward understanding why we have better healthcare, hand tools, and desserts today than a few hundred years ago is recognizing that ideas and technologies are non-rival.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Ideas—whether technologies, process improvements, political theories, inspiring or clarifying works of fiction and art, or anything else—are valuable because they can be used or experienced over and over and over again.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Do you think lives of the present and recent past (lives like yours) are lives worth living? Then, if you could peer into the future, you could expect to judge future lives to be worth living, too. So, if you’re a parent or you might be, go ahead and have normal parent anxieties. (We all do!) But cast off the dread.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“But denying the improvements of the last century diminishes the suffering of people who endured the premature deaths of their children and other loved ones in those earlier times. It dismisses the abject poverty that covered much of the world and has since been lessened. And it disrespects the generations of people before us who have worked toward—and succeeded in—making some corner or other of the human experience better. Perhaps worst, it suggests falsely that we are powerless to prevail against the big challenges that confront us now. It says that human effort and ingenuity cannot make things better. We say: They can and have.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Anyone who would prefer to be born to a random life in 1970 (when children were breathing in leaded gasoline fumes) or in 1870 (when children in richer countries were breathing in coal dust) or in 1770 (when Britain’s polluting industrial revolution was getting underway) or in 1670 (when the best estimates say that over a third of children everywhere stopped breathing altogether before age five) is not being serious about the quality of air and the quality of life available to people, then relative to now.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“In medieval populations, the probability of dying before age five was close to a third (or maybe it was closer to 40 percent; nobody has great records before the 1800s!). So, Dean explains, the fact that you were imagining your experience as being alive at all (perhaps toiling as a peasant without naproxen to ease your pain) was too optimistic.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Famines today are political events: most often driven by armed conflict, though sometimes driven by the terrible policy choices of the regimes in power.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“There can be enough for everyone. The data tell us that lives are better now than lives were in the past—even though there are now many more lives around. Fears of a depleted, overpopulated future are out of date.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“the future of parenting will be chosen parenting, so stabilization will only happen if it sounds good to the billions of individual decision-makers—that is, to the potential parents. There is no unavoidable conflict between good lives for women and avoiding depopulation. But there is a lot of work to do.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Make the decision for your life and your family that you think best. But influencing population trends is not on the priority list for solving the twenty-first century’s climate challenges.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Climate progress may turn better or worse in the coming decades. But that will be determined by technology, social awareness, and policy, not by population size.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Understanding this lets us see through the flaws in some common tropes. A 2022 NPR story about schools in developing countries proposed: “Why keeping girls in school is a good strategy to cope with climate change.” The idea was that more schooling will cause the next generation to choose smaller families. Education means lower birth rates, the argument goes, and lower birth rates mean fewer people. Fewer people mean less carbon pollution. It’s a solution that feels good. An easy win-win.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Almost sixty years have passed since The Population Bomb dropped. The global population has more than doubled. The future that Ehrlich ruled out as impossible—a population of, say, 8 billion—is the present we live in. His big bomb fizzled.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Global average exposure to particulate air pollution has fallen sharply since 2015. All the while, the world added over 750 million people.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Human life is polluting. That one human settlement in the cabin is polluting, disruptive, and dislocating, so intuition might tell us that the impact would scale with population. In particular, it may seem like it should scale in a straight line. If one family on one acre is bad, aren’t ten families together on one acre ten times as bad, and a hundred families on one acre—the density of a downtown city—a hundred times as bad? No, because the consequences of people do not scale in straight lines. It turns out that living together in a dense urban environment generates fewer emissions per person than spreading that same number of people out to far-flung places.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“Knowing this, you are ready for the question at the core of our book: Would depopulation be good or bad? Should anyone want—and be willing to work for—a different future, where humanity has stabilized its numbers, instead? Asking that question means asking questions of fact and questions of value, because whether avoiding depopulation would be good depends both on what the consequences will be (How many tons of CO2 are at stake? What will depopulation mean for living standards and material progress?) and on how to value them (Is there anything important lost when a good life that could be lived isn’t?). To compare depopulation and stabilization, we will need to assess the consequences one by one and arrive at an overall judgment.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

“If fertility rates keep falling where they are falling and stay low where they are low, then this future is coming. And we won’t be wrong about timing by more than a few decades.”
― Dean Spears, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People