After the Spike: A Liberal Argument for More Babies

“The Spike” – that is what demographer-economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso call the dramatic rise in the world population in the recent past, and the equally dramatic population decline projected for the near future.

Historians are familiar with the part of this story that’s in the past. Nineteenth and early twentieth century improvements in nutrition, living conditions, and public health turned infant and child death from a seeming inevitability that haunted most families to a rarity. The population exploded as most children survived to have children of their own. That pattern repeated in developing countries in the mid-twentieth century...

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