worldoptimization
One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew YglesiasMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve been enjoying Matt Yglesias’s substack for a while, but didn’t get around to reading this until now, because the premise sounded kind of boring at first or something.
But reading it I was basically like “okay, I’ve never fully thought through this before but now that I do it all just seems clearly right and it’s crazy that More People Aren’t Talking About This.”
The basic argument:
- it is better for the US to be the most powerful country in the world than for China or India to be
- there’s various second-order factors that go into this but the biggest thing is: how big is your economy
- at current trends China will overtake the US soon (or maybe has already done so depending on how you define things)
- growing the economy faster is hard and growing faster than China is near impossible given that the difficulty of growing increases as GDP per capita gets higher
- trying to make China poorer would be very bad from a humanitarian perspective
- otoh growing the US economy by increasing the number of people would not be that hard and we’re not really trying to do it
Not that any of this is the most important thing, but as opposed to other important things which are often weird and unpopular this seems like it should be popular, because most people in both parties want America to be great and don’t want China to become more powerful than us.
I guess people just intuitively have some weird Malthusian zero-sum mentality where more people -> less for us. You see it on the right when people worry about immigrants taking jobs, and on the left when people say that having kids is bad for the environment. When like, having more people also creates all kinds of positive externalities for other people that I guess are less intuitive.
Maybe the most striking illustration of this was a quote from a Trump official on immigration: “Why do we need more people? For the extra traffic congestion? More crowded classrooms? Longer emergency room and TSA lines?”
It’s interesting that the founding fathers didn’t fall into this trap even though their pre-Industrial Revolution world was in reality way more Malthusian than ours. Thomas Jefferson said, “the present desire of America is to produce rapid population by as great importations of foreigners as possible”; it seems like they mostly thought that increasing our population was important to the long-term security and prosperity of America.
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worldoptimization
some numbers, because I was kinda unsatisfied with the lack of numbers here:
- the US population is currently growing at a rate of 50 bps/year or so
- this breaks down into: +1.2% from children
- -1% from deaths
- +30 bps from net immigration
- China’s population is also growing at a similar rate but their population growth rate is plummeting and if current trends continue they are expected to start shrinking soon
- seems like China’s GDP is likely to get at least close to ours in the net 10 years but looks neck and neck after that: they’d prob still be growing faster per person than us but maybe outweighed by shrinking population
- if Americans started having the number of kids they say they want rather than the number of kids they actually have, we could more than double our population growth rate to 1.1%
- this would mean a ~20% bigger population by 2050: 450m vs current projected 380m
- but obviously would take at least 20 years before these kids start becoming economically productive
- we could get the same level of growth with people who are immediately economically productive by letting in 3x as many immigrants as we do currently: from 1m/year to 3m/year
- this would make our rate similar to Canada’s
- the majority of our immigrants are people with family in the US: we have roughly the same rate of those as Canada relative to population
- refugees are a pretty small group of both: the main difference is in economic immigrants. we accept fewer than Canada despite having 9x the population
- we could potentially increase immigration way more than that: apparently 150m people worldwide say they would immigrate to the US if they could
- but doing a lot more than 3m/year seems kinda risky/experimental
so Not an Economist but some toy graphs I made with numbers I googled:
current projections:
with 3x current immigration levels:
