Philip N Cohen
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philipncohen.com
Philip N Cohen
@philipncohen.com
Sociologist and demographer, University of Maryland; SocArXiv director.

New book: Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists https://cup.columbia.edu/book/citizen-scholar/9780231555418

Website: philipncohen.com
Blog: familyinequality.com
Reposted by Philip N Cohen
I want my articles to be written by a professional calligrapher on handcrafted paper with gold ink. If my university or funder refuse to pay for this, they are infringing my academic freedom.
January 13, 2026 at 1:45 PM
We are working on it for SocArXiv. Some servers, like biorxiv and medrxiv, already prohibit review and theory papers, partly for this reason. Harder in social science, where theory is an important category of research. But still
January 12, 2026 at 2:39 PM
Love that episode
January 12, 2026 at 12:40 PM
Their book is After the Spike.
Their 2024 paper is here: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti....
Their 2023 op-ed is here: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Their code and model output (for one iteration or another) is here: github.com/gagemweston/...
/6
January 12, 2026 at 2:03 AM
My real argument is that "birth rate boosting now" (as if that were possible, which I doubt), would work *against* the good things we have to accomplish in the next 100 years. Do the good things now -- taking advantage of the low and/or falling number of births we benefit from today.
/5
January 12, 2026 at 2:03 AM
I see no problem here that requires birth-rate boosting now, or any time this century. Instead it's all about making life better, and solving our many gigantic problems, in the next hundred years. That would be awesome. Maybe the people of the future will want to have more kids then. OK with me!
/4
January 12, 2026 at 2:03 AM
I like this scenario a lot. Global birth rates converge at about the current U.S. rate sometime after the end of this century, and population peaks around 10 billion. Then by 175 years later people want more births, or produce babies some other way, and they end up at 6 billion.
/3
January 12, 2026 at 2:03 AM
These are the rebound scenarios, where global total fertility rate converges to 1.66 (PLOS One, right) and something else (1.6?) in the book (left), and then rises back to 2.1 starting in 2125, 2150, or 2175. In the worst (2175) case, we're stabilize at ~6 billion by ~2300 (round numbers).
/2
January 12, 2026 at 2:03 AM
per 1000
January 11, 2026 at 11:09 PM
😂
January 11, 2026 at 10:51 PM
OK, ChatGPT 5.2 on cue. My prompt: "write a 200-word abstract for a paper that proposes a new theory to explain modern fertility trends in post-industrial societies, using [random theories] Marxist feminism, Jungian psychology, Second Demographic Transition theory, and neoclassical economics." Bingo
January 11, 2026 at 9:59 PM
Not preregistered, but I only checked this term, because in moderating hundreds of papers a month on SocArXiv, I saw the phrase "proposed framework" appearing in a lot of AI slop, short, data-free, superficially written papers with dramatic claims to originality and importance. Voila.
January 11, 2026 at 9:53 PM
Reposted by Philip N Cohen
My review article talks about how to tweak Becker's model to include unintended pregnancy and the transition to lower fertility levels. Recent research in economics is about how modern contraception and legal abortion led to a reduction in unintended pregnancy: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
The Economics of Childbearing: Trends, Progress, and Challenges
The neoclassical economics of childbearing turns 65 this year, marking the anniversary of Gary Becker's foundational article on the subject in 1960. This review article begins with a study of how...
www.annualreviews.org
January 11, 2026 at 6:29 PM
Nice! Thank you
January 11, 2026 at 9:02 PM
Thanks! This helps me a lot
January 11, 2026 at 6:46 PM