Is One Billion Americans A Good Idea? - Matthew Yglesias - #218

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, my friends. Welcome back. My guest today is Matthew Yglesias, journalist, writer and co-founder of vox.com. His new book, One Billion Americans, has quite a stark and obvious proposal that to combat the rising economic and political threat from China and India, America needs to breed and or immigrate a billion Americans. Fairly lofty target, considering that we've got quite a bit of population flattening in the West at the moment. But Matthew has done his research and come up with answers for what's gonna happen to pollution or overcrowding, housing crisis, education. What happens if you dilute down your culture because immigrants don't tend to be American, they tend to be Mexican or English or French or whatever it might be. So I will leave it to you to work out whether or not you want a billion Americans in the world. And let me know what you think. Matthew puts his views on the line today. And I really appreciate that. In other news, this episode of the podcast is brought to you by The Protein Works. I am being held together by the Protein Works at the moment. That is what the substructure of my body is created from right now. Their super greens powder is making life a lot easier for me. If you didn't know, I snapped my Achilles a few weeks ago. My appetite's not fantastic at the moment. A really easy way to bolster my greens and fruit is to use a super greens powder. The one from the Protein Works is by far the most good tasting. The most good tasting? Like what am I on about? It's the best taste, the most good tasting. Fuck me. The best tasting greens powder that I've found so far, definitely from the Protein Works. Also the Protein Crunkies. All of their bars that they make are absolutely fantastic. You can get 35% off everything that they make. Another thing you need to have in your life, vitamin D, D3 deficiency has been positively correlated with people being more susceptible to COVID. Definitely would not recommend getting that this year. So make sure that you're supplementing with vitamin D3. Make sure that you've got a multivitamin, some fish oils would be good, super greens and you can see everything that I use at the proteinworks.com/modernwisdom. Have a look under the hood, all of the supplements that I use and recommend are on there. And with the code MODERN35, you get 35% off everything, not just the stuff that I recommend, but anything else that you stumble across on the site. You have to go and check them out. Their stuff is so cheap already and it's got even cheaper with 35% off. Plus if you're thinking, I don't really know what to get, I don't know what the good proteins are or what's that super green thing that Chris mentioned, you see the full list, everything I recommend, the proteinworks.com/modernwisdom.
But for now, it's time to work out if we need a billion Americans with Matthew Yglesias.
What's the central thesis of 1 billion Americans?

**Matthew Yglesias** (3:16)
I said, 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 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 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.

**Chris Williamson** (4:05)
Yeah, for numbers, it's sort of 330 million or so at the moment, right?

**Matthew Yglesias** (4:10)
Yeah, so we're talking about tripling. I used very rigorous mathematical formulas, and I came up with nice round numbers. You triple what we have, you get to one billion. So that's science of book writing. So if you want a technical explanation, if the United States grew at the same rate, our population grew at the same rate that Canada's population is growing. If we hit that target and maintained it, we would be at one billion by the end of the century.

**Chris Williamson** (4:42)
Wow, so Canadians are just having at it.

**Matthew Yglesias** (4:45)
They're doing well. No, so Canada has more immigrants than the United States does. As a share of its population, of course, we have more. Nobody lives in Canada. And a slightly higher birth rate. And that gets it done. And it's a good comparison, I think, because there's more immigration to Canada, and 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 just slight tweaks to the policy environment, and they get you to a different outcome, and they get you to, I think, a better outcome ultimately.