The Great Baby Shortage
The Political Orphanage
Andrew Heaton
4.9 • 1000 Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2026
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers. |
| 0:14.4 | I'm your host, Andrew Heaton, the Johnny Carson of weird yet soothing politics, speaking of which |
| 0:23.0 | Guess which guest appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson the most times, |
| 0:28.1 | which person of all the musicians and presidents and actors in Johnny's Rolodex |
| 0:32.9 | did he wind up inviting on the program the most? |
| 0:36.5 | Paul McCartney? |
| 0:38.7 | Dick Van Dyke? |
| 0:40.2 | Nixon? |
| 0:41.9 | Sock it to me? |
| 0:42.6 | No. |
| 0:47.4 | A biologist and doomsayer named Paul Ehrlich. |
| 0:52.1 | It was about 10 years ago this month that Dr. Paul Ehrlich made his first appearance on the tonight show, and it elicited probably more mail than any |
| 0:54.3 | guests at that time we have ever had on a show. It had to do with his book, The Population Bomb. |
| 1:00.3 | I have a standard answer, as you know, for people who say we can support 20 billion people easily. |
| 1:05.4 | We have a little over 4 billion today. Large numbers of them are undernourished. We don't have |
| 1:09.2 | enough energy to go around. People think the environment is deteriorating and so on. Why don't we try doing a really good job with 4 billion people, see if we can do that? After we got 4 billion people well taken care of in a clean environment with good health and everybody's fed and everybody has opportunities and so on, then we can say, gee, all right, maybe we could do with five. What would be the advantage of five? Well, there would be another half a billion women, for instance, |
| 1:30.3 | which I would find an advantage. Yeah, right. But I just assume have the four billion taken care |
| 1:35.6 | of right first. His book, The Population Bomb, kicks off with this gloomy prediction. The battle to |
| 1:42.4 | feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, |
| 1:47.0 | hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked |
| 1:52.1 | upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. |
| 1:58.9 | Ehrlich looked at the world's massively expanding population and predicted that mass starvation |
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