Editor's Note, September 2025
Written by Marian Starkey | Published: September 8, 2025
Another magazine issue marking the end of another season of absurd headlines about low birth rates and impending population collapse.
A recent prompt for such stories has been the publication of a book by two University of Texas at Austin economists, Dean Spears and Michael Geruso. After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People is sitting in my Kindle unread as yet. While I procrastinate on getting into the original source material, I’m reading and listening to plenty of interviews with the authors.
Spears is the Director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at UT–Austin, and Geruso is “affiliated” as a researcher but appears not to have an official title. In all of these articles and interviews, and in the two op-eds Spears has published in The New York Times recently (one with Geruso), no mention has been made of the fact that the founding of the Population Wellbeing Initiative was made possible by a certain billionaire patron writing a check for $10 million …
Who else but Elon Musk.
One news outlet that hasn’t shied away from reporting on this unsavory association is Bloomberg. A 2023 article of theirs is how we came to know of the Musk–Spears relationship. It was followed by a more in-depth investigation into their alliance last year.
The name of the UT–Austin initiative and the title of the new book are misleadingly positive — the ideas behind them are less rosy, and some of them are downright bizarre. A philosophy called Effective Altruism is at the root of some of the weirdness. Spears wrote in his 2023 New York Times op-ed, “Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them …” In his view, we should usher as many new people onto the planet as possible because otherwise some good lives will go unlived (without acknowledging that many of these hypothetical lives could also be miserable).
A couple years ago, Spears calculated population projections to 2400. According to his modeling, if the entire world converged on the same total fertility rate that we have in the US — 1.66 at the time of the study — in 300 years, there would be about 2 billion people on Earth. It’s only been a hundred years since the world population was last measuring about 2 billion. Would it really be so bad if it gradually contracted back to that level over the course of three centuries?
The author of the feature article in this issue, Samuel Miller McDonald, confronts similarly questionable arguments made by people with large media platforms. He calls out the absurdity of worrying about a mass extinction of humans (which doesn’t, grammatically or otherwise, make sense) and reminds us that it’s an estimated 1 million other species around the world that are actually at risk of disappearing. The true mass extinction event is the one we’re currently witnessing and largely responsible for causing.
Marian Starkey: marian@popconnect.org