Is One Billion Americans A Good Idea? | Matthew Yglesias | Modern Wisdom Podcast 218

There's a few different goals, but I mean, I think the primary one is to try to refocus the United States and American politics on big things, uh, which is what we have been doing for a long time. I think for all its many flaws of American policy over those years, it's been superior to the other alternatives that have been on the table, and I think that continues to be the case in an era of sort of rising Chinese power. But upholding certain values is important to us holding together as a nation, and it speaks to our international role. (wind blows)

What's the central thesis of One Billion Americans?

It's th- the United States should take seriously the sort of prospect of international competition with India and especially China, and see that the biggest edge that those countries have on us is their incredibly larger population, which gives China in particular an aggregate, you know, economic weight that by some measures already exceeds ours, and by other measures will soon. And we should act to try to grow, like, literally grow our country and become a denser, larger, more populated country, and to recognize that the current United States is, is really an incredibly sparsely populated country, and people perceive that there would be, like, some enormous burden in tripling the population, but actually there would be a lot of just pure domestic advantages to it.

Yeah, for numbers, it's sort of 330 million or so at the moment, right?

Yeah, so we're talking about, about tripling. I, you know, I, I, I used, um, very rigorous mathematical formulas and I, I came up with nice round numbers. Uh, you triple what we have, you get to one billion. So that's, that's science of, uh, book writing. Um, so if, if you wanna, if you want a technical explanation, i- if the United States grew at the same rate, our population grew at the same rate that Canada's population is growing, uh, if we hit that target and maintained it, we would be at one billion, uh, by the end of the century.

Wow, so Canadians are just having at it.

They're d- they're doing well. No, so Canada has, uh, more immigrants than, than the United States does, as a share of its population, of course, we have, we have more, there's, nobody lives in Canada, um, and a slightly higher birth rate, and, and, you know, that gets it done. And, and it's a good comparison, I think, because there's more immigration to Canada, and there's a, there's a higher level of fertility there, but neither of them are like crazy, you know? If you walk to Toronto, you know, it's a big city, it's an international city, but you're not like, "Wow, this is totally different from Chicago." You know, it's, it's just slight tweaks to the policy environment and they get you to a different outcome, and, and they get you to, I think, a better outcome ultimately.