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After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for PeopleBook

by Dean Spears & Michael Geruso, 2025

Who uses, recommends or left After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Jason Furman
Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard and former Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers.
loved

It had the best opening sentence of any nonfiction book I read this year: "In 2012, 146 million children were born. That was more than in any prior year. It was also more than in any year since. Millions fewer will be born this year. The year 2012 may well turn out to be the year in which the most humans were ever born—ever as in ever for as long as humanity exists." Such a simple and obvious fact but I had not known it before. I had to keep reading.

Five Books interview on the best economics books of 2025

2025-12-21·fivebooks.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

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The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

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