Article Baby bust: Towards political demography Paul Robbins University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Sara H. Smith University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Abstract Despite the persistence of Malthusian arguments that human population will grow to outstrip the Earth’s capacity and resources, current demography actually foretells the impending end of growth in the next half century. We are approaching a global baby bust. What does this mean for global political labor economies, regional resource economics, and local struggles over gender and power? This paper concludes, through a survey of current research, that geographers already have the conceptual equipment to answer these enormously important questions. We further argue that the fundamental underpinnings of much contem- porary economic and social theory, having been developed in times of rapid population growth and labor surplus, must be reconsidered as we enter a period of different material conditions. Reviewing recent developments in population geography and feminist geopolitics, global geographies of labor and aging, and emerging patterns of resource intensification and disintensification, we suggest that – if infused with an explicit political economy – attending to the baby bust can show the way forward to help revitalize our understanding of bodies and materiality in critical and human geography. Keywords aging, demographic transition, feminist geography, fertility, geopolitics, Malthus, political ecology I Introduction Walking in the shade of towering silver oak trees on a large plantation in Chikmaglur Dis- trict, in the Indian state of Karnataka, we are engaging a coffee grower on the pressures that make him change how he manages his land, uses or abandons pesticides, and selects his crops. The answers we expect him to provide include things like farm gate prices, fertilizer costs, and turbulent shifts in international mar- kets. His answer, however, is ‘people’: workers these days, he explains, are ‘lazy’, demand more wages, take longer cigarette breaks and request all kinds of amenities, like electricity. There are simply too few workers and the bargaining power of those remaining in the countryside is rising. While the conditions for working people here remain brutal, their situation is mediated by a scarcity of people. We stop and reflect. Certainly there are rea- sons to have anticipated this. Competition from Corresponding author: Paul Robbins, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Email: director@nelson.wisc.edu Progress in Human Geography 1–21 ª The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0309132516633321 phg.sagepub.com at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on April 11, 2016 phg.sagepub.com Downloaded from