One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger

by Matthew Yglesias

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

What if the answer to many of America's most thorny issues could be found in one "simple" solution? Increase our population to 1 billion. An audacious proposal that addresses immigration, housing, jobs, environment, international economic competition and everything else you might think to ask. This argument to think bigger is a completely fresh thought-puzzle—and arguing with Matthew Yglesias along the way is a whole lot of fun.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

What would actually make America great: more people.
 
If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. We can’t compete with the huge population clusters of the global marketplace by keeping our population static or letting it diminish, or with our crumbling transit and unaffordable housing. The winner in the future world is going to have more—more ideas, more ambition, more utilization of resources, more people. 
 
Exactly how many Americans do we need to win? According to Matthew Yglesias, one billion.
 
From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing. Vox founder Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Drawing on examples and solutions from around the world, Yglesias shows not only that we can do this, but why we must. 
 
Making the case for massive population growth with analytic rigor and imagination, One Billion Americans issues a radical but undeniable challenge: Why not do it all, and stay on top forever?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593853887
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Matthew Yglesias is the co-founder and senior correspondent for Vox. He also hosts the political podcast “The Weeds” and is a regular contributor to NPR's All Things Considered. Prior to Vox, he was a columnist for Slate, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and wrote for The American Prospect and The Atlantic. A New York City native, he currently lives in Washington, DC.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
America Is Too Small

The American political system has fallen into a state of torpor and dysfunction driven by, among other things, the absence of a shared sense of purpose.

Disagreement and debate are vital in a free society. But it’s also useful at times to have common goals—settle the West, beat the Nazis, win the Cold War—that structure the disagreements. What we’ve been doing lately isn’t so much debating how to proceed as a country as it is simply fighting with one another. And now the country faces a very real challenge that we must meet: rapid ongoing economic growth in India and especially China is leading to the relative decline of the United States of America as a great power and threatens its position as the world’s number one state in the not-too-distant future.

Contemporary American politicians give no sign of wanting to accept that decline, but they’re also not proposing to do anything about it. There’s no way that all the specific ideas in this book will ever command broad consensus in American society. But I think the big picture idea of the book, that America should try to stay number one, already does. The question is what follows from that.

For starters, it is beyond dispute that there are fewer Americanpeople than there are Chinese or Indian people, as is the fact that China and India are trying to become less poor and seem to be succeeding. Maybe they’ll just stumble and fail, in which case we will stay number one. But it would be unfortunate for hundreds of millions of people to be consigned to poverty forever. It’s not an outcome we have it within our power to guarantee. And even if we could, it would be hideously immoral to pursue it.

By contrast, tripling the nation’s population to match the rising Asian powers is something that is in our power to achieve. It would require more immigrants and more programs to support people who want to have additional children. And of course if we had a lot more people, we’d need to adjust a number of other things to make sure they had jobs and places to live. Working out the exact details of how best to structure family support programs, how best to pay for them, exactly which additional immigrants to let in, and how to improve our infrastructure and increase our housing stock are good things to argue about. The ideas laid out in this book are the best ones I could find. But nothing will command universal assent or be beyond the realm of political dispute and political bargaining.

But think of how much healthier our politics would be if there were really a debate about how to accomplish great things rather han a food fight over semi-imagined offenses to “real Americans” that serves as a mask for an endless procession of tax cuts for the rich. Why not make America greater than ever instead?

Conservatives argue that the country is “full” and we can’t take more immigrants. Progressives tend to disagree, even while being inclined to say that the particular towns and cities they live in are full and don’t need more real estate development. America’s birthrate has slipped to historic lows and nobody in the political mainstream seems to think we can or should do anything about it. Meanwhile, the seemingly unstoppable rise of China as a world power hangs like a dark cloud over American politics.

None of this is right.

Early in my career, I focused largely on foreign policy topics. But for more than a decade, I’ve primarily covered domestic issues. And as I’ve done so, I’ve been struck by the growing popularity of the view that somehow foreigners—whether through immigration or trade—are to blame for our various domestic problems.

The truth is exactly the reverse. We didn’t prosper in the late twentieth century because we won the Cold War; we won the Cold War because our underlying political and economic system was a lot better than Soviet communism. Today our international situation is imperiled because we have let a staggering array of lingering problems fester and prevent us from becoming as big and as rich a country as we ought to be.

But the United States is not “full.” Many of its iconic cities—including not just famous cases of collapse like Detroit but also Philadelphia and Chicago and dozens of smaller cities like Rochester and Erie—actually have fewer residents than they had decades ago. And virtually all of our thriving cities easily have room to grow and accommodate more people.

And we should accommodate more people. Immigrants of virtually all stripes help make native-born Americans richer, make our retirement programs more sustainable, and offer the fuel for innovation that can help the country grow. Housing shortages are endemic in many parts of the country, but the tools to surmount them are easily available and—like immigration—would cost taxpayers nothing. Providing adequately for America’s families—by offering not just paid leave but financial assistance, preschool and aftercare services, reasonable summer programming, and affordable college for all qualified students—would cost money. But it would greatly benefit America’s children and make it much easier for middle-class people to have the number of kids they say they want.

As a policy reporter, I’m much more a generalist than a specialist. And I like doing stories about solutions. Like many people, when I look at something long enough I start to see patterns in it.

—The solution to America’s new urban housing crisis is to build more houses so more people can move to in‑demand cities.
—The solution to the illegal immigration crisis is to let more people come legally, not tie ourselves into knots trying to stop the flow.
—Both America’s vast rural hinterland and many of its agingn ortheastern and midwestern cities need an influx of people to prevent their current priceless assets from wasting away.
—America’s families need help from a more robust welfare state in order to be able to have and raise children with secure middle-class lifestyles.

But for a long time these patterns seemed to be parts of a puzzle whose pieces didn’t quite fit together. More immigration is good, but the cities the immigrants tend to move to already don’t have enough housing. More housing is good, but that might only exacerbate rural depopulation. What put it all together was glancing back into the foreign policy realm. What the various diplomats and admirals and trade negotiators and Asia hands who think about the China question don’t want to admit is that all the diplomacy and aircraft carriers and shrewd trade tactics in the world aren’t going to make a whit of difference if China is just a much bigger and more important country than we are. The original Thirteen Colonies, by the same token, could have made for a nice, quiet, prosperous agricultural nation—like a giant New Zealand. But no number of smart generals could have helped a country like that intervene decisively in World War II.

If sane, humane child and family policy gives us more people; and sane, humane immigration policy also gives us more people; and if declining areas need more people but expensive areas also need more housing, then the solution to the puzzle is that we shoulddo it all and stay number one forever.

A more populous America—filled with more immigrants and more children, with its cities repopulated and its construction industry booming—would not be staring down the barrel of inevitable relative decline. We are richer today than China or India. And while we neither can nor should wish for those countries to stay poor, we can become even richer by becoming larger. And by becoming larger we will also break the dynamic whereby growth in Asia naturally means America’s eclipse as the world’s leading power.

The United States has been the number one power in the world throughout my entire lifetime and throughout the living memory of essentially everyone on the planet today. The notion that this state of affairs is desirable and ought to persist is one of the least controversial things you could say in American politics today.

We should take that uncontroversial premise seriously, adopt the logical inference that to stay on top we’re going to need more people—about a billion people—and then follow that inference to where it leads in terms of immigration, family policy and the welfare state, housing, transportation, and more.

Table of Contents

Introduction: America Is Too Small ix

Part I The Problem

Chapter 1 A Very Short History of American Power 3

Chapter 2 America Is Empty 17

Chapter 3 The Dismal Economics of Child Rearing 51

Part II The Solution

Chapter 4 Taking Families Seriously 69

Chapter 5 More and Better Immigrants 105

Chapter 6 Comeback Cities 143

Part III We Can Have Nice Things

Chapter 7 Curing Housing Scarcity 185

Chapter 8 Getting Around 215

Chapter 9 A Land of Plenty 243

Epilogue: We the (Not Enough) People 261

Acknowledgments 265

Editorial Reviews

"Many economics books devote themselves to cataloging the world’s ills, and then end with a curiously short 'solutions' chapter that doesn’t really solve most of the problems in the book. One Billion Americans is a novel twist on this model. It . . . dives into a long catalog of solutions. Most of them are very good ideas."—The New York Times Book Review

"An argument that blends demography, economics, and politics . . . The thesis is eminently arguable, but the book is packed full of provocative ideas well worth considering."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Well researched and convincing. This optimistic call to action is worth considering."—Publishers Weekly 

"There are plenty of reasons to question how the U.S. might absorb so many new citizens, but Yglesias makes a provocative case for a new kind of American greatness."—The New York Times The Morning newsletter 

“The genius of this book is in showing that dilemmas that are siloed across vast swaths of public policy are actually the same problem, with linked solutions. A bracing, ambitious manifesto that will leave you excited about the future that America could build, and furious at the weakness and decline so-called ‘nationalists’ want to ensure.”—Ezra Klein, editor-at-large and cofounder of Vox, bestselling author of Why We’re Polarized
 
“One Billion Americans points to the practical changes that the United States can make in order to earn back its inherited position as the leader on the path toward universal freedom and dignity. It warns us all that being the envy of the world is a choice, not a fate.”—Paul Romer, Nobel Prize–winning economist

“The goal of One Billion Americans is to make us think, and that is exactly what it does. How can America continue to be a global force? How can we make ‘American Exceptionalism’ a long-term reality? Matthew Yglesias does an amazing job serving up ideas, which we all need to seriously consider, in a book that is well worth reading.”—Mark Cuban, entrepreneur

“Yglesias is an unpredictable thinker, willing to fly in the face of tribal norms…One Billion Americans harkens back to a time when policy discussions were not tribal melees.”—National Review

"Argues persuasively for liberal policies in the service of a nation-building agenda . . . Yglesias walks the line successfully, managing not only to make a decisive case for several critical policies but also to confront some malignant beliefs historically present in liberal thought, all while appealing to  American national pride."—LiberalCurrents 

“[Yglesias] ponders how the United States might evolve if it were much more open to immigrants…[and] makes a bold case for openness in his own country.”—The Economist

“The basic idea of the book, that America needs to commit to remaining the world's most powerful, productive nation, is a project that conservatives should emphatically support. Because Yglesias is right: We need more people.”—Washington Free Beacon

“Audacious, purposefully provocative, and yet utterly persuasive, One Billion Americans does what the best works of political nonfiction do, recalibrating not just our sense of what is possible, but of what is necessary. American decline isn’t inevitable, as much as it seems to be. We can avoid it, if we try.”—David Wallace-Wells, author of New York Times bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth

"One of those rare, sparkling books that sets out to argue a point that you are likely not to have a deeply settled opinion on, and then forces you to work through a whole series of interconnected views and assumptions you may not realize you had. Persuasive and fresh, even where it may fail to convince you, it succeeds in making you think. Really think."—Chris Hayes, host of "All In" on MSNBC and the "Why is this Happening?" podcast, author of A Colony in a Nation

"One Billion Americans is not just surpassingly intelligent—it’s also very clever: To support his plea for a much larger population, Yglesias sneaks in remedies for nearly every domestic policy failure that now besets us. In the process of arguing for a nation with more people, he provides the tools to build one that is also more prosperous and more equitable. This is an original, engaging, and necessary book."—Daniel Okrent, author of The Guarded Gate and Last Call


“Yet the wide range of contributors of Yglesias’s plans—market economists, social democrats, socialists, even communitarian conservatives—suggest that there may be a wider audience for these ideas than at first appears. Maybe pandemic nihilism and the crumbling of American institutions have gotten to me, but this little book is at once hopeful and utterly depressing: A reminder that if there was consensus that the US possessed a common wealth, it could be grown beyond measure.”—Quartz
“Matt Yglesias’ new book, One Billion Americans, will be one of the most important books of the decade.”—Exponents

From the Publisher

★ 2020-06-27
An argument that blends demography, economics, and politics to suggest a way to maintain America’s great-power status in the 21st century.

It’s enough to make a zero population growth advocate faint. Vox co-founder and editor Yglesias proposes that the only way to keep China at bay is to beat the Chinese at their own game, growing a population of 1 billion Americans. But how? One ingredient is a far more liberal immigration policy: “The solution to the illegal immigration crisis is to let more people come legally, not tie ourselves into knots trying to stop the flow.” Another ingredient is a massive expansion of the social welfare state to allow for such things as family leave and tax concessions. And what of already overcrowded American cities and their minuscule amounts of affordable housing stock? It’s the last matter at which the author’s argument really takes off. He offers a well-deliberated critique of housing policies that he does not hesitate to call racist, policies that forbid the construction of multiple-family dwellings in suburban and exurban areas. Yglesias proposes that immigrants be encouraged to live in uncrowded cities in the interior, bringing new vigor to American places that lack cultural or economic life. Still, the author is a celebrant of the metropolis, noting that, for instance, if a given town builds a base to accommodate 30 restaurants, “not only do you get specialization, you get competition—two different burger joints offering a slightly different approach”—as well as “a deeper labor market.” However, won’t 1 billion people crowd out nature, farms, etc.? In his proposed scenario, the density of the lower 48 states would be 3.5 times lower than England today, resembling France more than overstuffed Holland or Italy. He sees nothing but economic good in population growth. “A bigger country will need a lot of new stuff,” he writes. “So will a zero-carbon economy.”

The thesis is eminently arguable, but the book is packed full of provocative ideas well worth considering.

Kirkus Reviews