Last Friday, I had the pleasure of chatting with Dean Spears, co-author of the hit book After the Spike, about the economics and philosophy of population change. This was my first time interviewing someone for Substack, so let me know if you have any suggestions for next time!
We start off with an overview of key ideas from the book—TL;DR: the world is about to start exponentially depopulating, and nobody knows how to stop it. And pretty soon we hit on some (literally) eye-popping facts as well as some interesting backstories I’d never heard before. A few highlights:
Is the Social Security Administration predicting a population spike—or something else? (57:50)
Whose writing inspired After the Spike? (23:40)
Overpopulation : Reasons and Persons :: Depopulation : ??? (1:07:30)
Does Zombie Negative Utilitarianism still live among us? (1:02:00)1
We also had a chance to get into some subscriber questions (e.g. from Barry Lam). And of course we dwelt awhile on the Repugnant Conclusion.
Tune in next Friday at 2pm for my conversation with Hannah Kim!
DEAN’S PICKS
Some interviewers ask people about their favorite books or colors or whatever. I asked Dean, What’s an academic article that you really love?
Bill Anglin (1977), “The Repugnant Conclusion,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
And as a bonus:
Joseph Kuefler (2022), The Digger and the Duckling.
In our chat, I mention that “negative utilitarianism” was killed off by the observation that it implies we should exterminate all life in the universe. A fun fact, which I had to fact-check because it sounds too cute to be true, is that this clever observation was first made by Jack Smart’s brother. (Jack Smart—one of the great Australian utilitarians—seemed very pleased about this.)
