It is a good thing that he didn’t have to convince me. His argument is that it would be better if there were many more people living in the United States. Yglesias’s new book covers each of them in the citation-laden detail of the policy journalist that he is.

So we cannot evaluate declining fertility statistics without considering the wellbeing, opportunities and inequalities facing the women who would be mothers.Įach of these is important. Of course, more people must come from more pregnancies. Another is economics: more people create more innovation, more technology, more art. One is the environment: more people create more pollution. How many people there are matters for many reasons. So we have accidentally ignored the hard question that we now need to answer: is the coming downsizing of the human population good, bad or something else? The narrative of explosive population growth has endured long after the facts have changed. Sixty years later, many people still think so. Thoughtful people learned that there was an “overpopulation problem”. In the 1960s, the worldwide population was growing faster than it ever had before – and more than twice as fast as it is growing now. The prospect of a shrinking population is surprising. I will not live long enough to see a population growing smaller, and you may not either. If fertility rates do not reverse trend and begin increasing, then there will never again be so many people alive. Demographers predict that a few years after 2100, the human population will begin to diminish. So, Jeremy will live to see a world in which each year ends with fewer people alive than the year before. Globally, that figure is about 2.5 today. By then, the average woman is expected to have less than two children. If Jeremy lives as long as demographic tables predict, he will live into the 22nd century. So 60 million more people are now alive than were when Jeremy was born. In those ten months, more people have been born than died. Jeremy then raced through ten brief months since being born. My son spent nine long months growing inside my wife. Now he is down for the morning nap and I can write. But he loves throwing yogurt on the floor, turning pages and playing with his dad. Jeremy hates that even more than he hates shrunken cloth diapers or wearing pants. So Matt probably knows about the snot sucker.Ī few minutes ago, I drew snot from a baby’s nose by sucking through a plastic tube. Matthew Yglesias, author of One Billion Americans, is a father of one, pushing 40.

The case for 1 billion americans