Michael Geruso, UT Austin, Book Talk on “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People”
January 14, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:15 pm PST
Biography: Dr. Michael Geruso is coauthor of After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People. Geruso is an economic demographer, public economist, and associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2023 to 2024, he served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he advised on issues of health and population. He holds bachelor’s degrees in engineering, political science, and philosophy. He earned his PhD in economics from Princeton and completed postdoctoral work at Harvard prior to joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. His work has been published in top peer-reviewed outlets including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and Demography, and has been featured in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the Atlantic, the Economist, and more.
After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
Description: Most people on Earth today live in a country where birth rates already are too low to stabilize the population: fewer than two children for every two adults. In After the Spike, economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso sound a wakeup call, explaining why global depopulation is coming, why it matters, and what to do now. It would be easy to think that fewer people would be better—better for the planet, better for the people who remain. This book invites us all to think again. Spears and Geruso investigate what depopulation would mean for the climate, for living standards, for equity, for progress, for freedom, for humanity’s general welfare. And what it would mean if, instead, people came together to share the work of caregiving, making parenting better, and stabilizing our numbers. After the Spike asks what future we should want for our planet, for our children, and for one another.
