Dean Spears & Michael Geruso on Why We Need More People

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dean Spears and Michael Geruso are economists, demographers, and associate professors at the University of Texas at Austin. Their book After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People is out on July 8, 2025. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Dean Spears and Michael Geruso explore whether a higher population really impacts climate change, why more people on the planet means more geniuses, and how we can avoid depopulation. Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! ⁠Spotify⁠ | ⁠Apple⁠ | ⁠Google⁠ X: ⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠ & ⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠ YouTube: ⁠Yascha Mounk⁠, ⁠Persuasion⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Exclusively on Disney Plus.
0:02.0	It's hard and it's brutal and that's what makes it special.
0:06.0	The multi-award winning series, FX's The Bear, is back for a brand new season.
0:11.0	Upon my signal, unleash hell.
0:15.0	And every second counts.
0:17.0	When that shows zero, this restaurant ceases operations.
0:21.8	FX is the bear.
0:22.8	New season now streaming exclusively on Disney Plus.
0:27.1	18 plus subscription required, season C's apply.
0:30.7	We know to reject zero-sum thinking about international trade.
0:34.7	We know to reject zero-sum thinking about the environment that we all have to
0:37.9	decarbonize together, but we still have this zero-sum approach to the population and to other people.
0:43.8	And so part of what we're hoping to accomplish is to get people out of that zero-sum mindset
0:48.9	about other people and see that other people are win-win. Their lives are good for them,
0:52.5	their lives are good for the rest of us.
0:54.3	And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk.
1:03.2	From Thomas Malthus to Paul Ehrlich, there has long been deep concern that we may be facing a crisis
1:08.8	of overpopulation. But if there's too many children,
1:11.6	we can't feed them, we're depleting the resources of the planet and people might die. Well,
1:17.6	actually it looks like the concern at the moment might have to be in the other direction. What most
1:23.9	people haven't realized is the extent to which we now have fertility below replacement,
1:29.3	not just in Italy or China or some famous places around the world, but in the United States and Canada.
	...

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