The Great Baby Shortage

For decades, intellectuals warned that overpopulation would trigger famine, ecological collapse, and mass death. Instead, humanity may now face the opposite problem. In this episode of The Political Orphanage, Andrew Heaton talks with Dean Spears about his book After the Spike and the surprising reality of global depopulation. Why are birth rates collapsing across the developed world—and increasingly in the developing world too? What happens to economies, innovation, retirement systems, and civilization itself when populations begin to shrink? Along the way: Paul Ehrlich's failed predictions, the legacy of the Population Bomb era, why people stop having kids when they get richer, and whether humanity should actually be worried about a future with fewer humans.