In the second half of the 20th century, as those of you who were already alive will well remember, the case for urgently reducing world population — by making sure everyone who wasn’t trying for a pregnancy was on long-acting contraception — was being promoted by developed country leaders. They argued that the Earth would not be able to sustain the rapidly growing population, and developed national, regional and global policies for the two-child family. China, of course, as having the biggest population by far, had a one-child policy for something like three decades.
But times have changed and the massive efforts to get every couple to have no more than two children have worked exceedingly well. So much so that three books reviewed in the LRB in November 2025 are about “the risks of global depopulation”, “why the world needs more people”, and “the decline and fall of the human empire: why our species is on the edge of extinction”.
Several major new aspects of the subject have also emerged: both the effects and consequences related to climate change and a call for robots and artificial intelligence to replace the missing humans. “Woe is me!” is the only response I can come up with.
The excellent review of the three books is by David Runciman: “Are we doomed?”, LRB, Vol.47, No.21, 20 November 2025, pp.11-16. He is an honorary professor of politics at Cambridge in the UK and a podcast: https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/history-of-ideas.
I’m unable to share any of the text but if you go to the website of the London Review of Books, you can read the whole review at https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n21/david-runciman/are-we-doomed — without being a subscriber! You can also read three letters to the editor, of which I very much recommend the third one! Editor