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On the cover of their new book, authors Dean Spears and Michael Geruso have a graph of the global population over time. The population is small and roughly stable for pretty much all of human history. It rises after the advent of agriculture, some ten thousand years ago, but that bump looks rather minor now.

It's only after the industrial revolution that we see this enormous spike, taking us from a world containing 1 billion people in 1800 to over 8 billion today. So far, so familiar.

But what Spears and Geruso are interested in is what happens next. Their book is titled 'After the Spike' because they foresee an imminent addition to the familiar population graph: a descent just as steep as the ascent. An exponential decline that might even take us back to a global population smaller than that of 1800.

I speak to Dean Spears today about what demographic research indicates is imminently in store for us as a species, and what might be on the horizon 'after the spike.'

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