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

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

Matthew Yglesias is a writer and the Co-Founder of Vox. There is an impending economic and social threat from China and India to America's global dominance. Is the answer to import and breed a billion Americans? Let's find out... Sponsor: Check out everything I use from The Protein Works at https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ (35% off everything with the code MODERN35) Extra Stuff: Buy One Billion Americans - https://amzn.to/2YYJjtY  Follow Matthew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattyglesias  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello my friends, welcome back. My guest today is Matthew Iglesias, 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 going to 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. But for now, it's time to work out if we need a billion Americans with Matthew Eglaceus. What's the central thesis of one billion Americans? 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 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.

Yeah, for numbers, it's a sort of 3.30 million, also at the moment, right? 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 $1 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. Wow. So Canadians are just having that. 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. There's 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. 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 do a different outcome and they get you to, I think a better outcome, ultimately.

The thing from my side being British is that I really can't tell the difference. None of us can tell the difference. You have to really know America and Canada and then you're like, ah, that one held the door open for me. He's one of the Canadians. That's the way that you tell. Some of them are French though.

I mean, I'm sure you can figure that out. I can tell those, or I can tell George St. Pierre, if he came up to me, I'd know that it was him. If Jordan Peterson came up to me, I'd know that it was him and then everyone else could be. Yeah, who's to say? The Canary in the Colman that is, did they open the door or not? What's the goal that you want to achieve then with a billion Americans? Yeah, I mean, there's a few different goals, but I mean, I think the primary one is to try to like, on a high level, refocus the United States and American politics on big things, which is what we have, you know, been

doing for a long time. For as long as everyone who's alive today has been here, the United States has been sort of the world's number one power. You know, we got the baton from you guys about a century ago in World War One. And 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. And that we should take that seriously as a core part of America's

national identity that we, you know, we were joking around about being similar to Canada. But obviously one big difference is that the United States is a major world power and Canada is not. And one reason for that is that a long time ago, you go back to like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, all of America's famous leaders, they wanted this to be a major country. When they have different phrases for it, shining city on the hill and FDR, the arsenal of democracy. But it's sort of been part of our mission, I think, not to necessarily, when Georgia

and Bucharest President, things got a little at a hand. And there was this idea that we were going to like conquer everyone and make them all democracies. And, you know, that's not good. We shouldn't do that. But upholding certain values is important to us holding together as a nation and it speaks to our international role.

And the book is about trying to recapture those sort of very traditional, very American sentiments. And then also just discuss a project that sounds a little loopy to people in sort of real technical terms and see that it's not as loopy as it sounds. Why is American not as big and rich as it ought to be then? You are still very populous, huge in terms of actual space as well. I did a road trip across America last year and it took

there was a day that I went through four states and drove for 10 hours doing like 500 miles. If I drive for 500 miles in any direction from where I am in the UK, I'm in water. Like to drive 500 miles where you guys are from, it's just called a road trip. Yeah, it's a big, it's a big country. You don't want to think traditionally, right? Well, that's just traditionally currently as well. A challenge for America is to develop that vast landscape to the sort of best of our possibilities.

Right? You look at, you know, people will say, oh, we don't have room for all those people. You compare the United States to the UK, and it's not just that the UK is physically smaller, but it's much denser, right? You have what, 80 million people. So that's about what, a quarter of America's population, but a much, much, much smaller land mass.

And the truth is, it's still a really nice country. There's a giant global cosmopolitan city there, but there's also lots of nice farms. You go up North and even in the UK context, Scotland is virtually empty, just huge vast countryside, which just goes to show, it's like there's a lot of space for people, there's a lot of ways human habitation can exist

and we can have farms and we can have wilderness and we can have cool mountains, but just also more people in it. And that's part of reaching the sort of full potential that we have, both as an international player and as a sort of modern service-oriented economy. Why is it not as big and rich as it ought to be then given all of this land? Well, you know, these things take time. Obviously there was Indigenous inhabitants here once upon a time, largely wiped out through some unfortunate incidents.

Recently though, the United States has taken a couple of, you know, unfortunate policy terms. One is this kind of hard tilt against immigration, which I don't blame people for thinking that the situation that prevailed about 15 to 20 years ago when a lot of people were coming in unauthorized. You know, that upset people for good reasons. I mean, I think people feel, okay, if we have rules, people should be following the rules. But instead of moving from that system to like a better system, in which we had legal channels,

and we were selecting people in a responsible way, but people were continuing to come, we really shut down the flow. We've been trying to terrorize under Trump, you know, millions of people who are living here not doing anyone at New Harm. And at the same time, since 1980, the number of children that people are having

has been going down and down and down. And what's interesting is, the number of children that people say they would like to have, the number of children in particular that women say they would like to have is not drop it, right? It's not that we're seeing some total revolution in values and people like, ah, whatever, who wants kids. Instead, people are saying, ah, whatever, who wants kids? Instead, people are saying, look, childcare is too expensive. It's taking me a long time to achieve financial stability.

So I'm having that first child, you know, into my mid-30s and you've read it at a time. They're saying my personal finances are not stable enough. So, you know, we can do things on both of these fronts. We can have an organized legal flow of immigration that is still at a high volume, and we can have supports for families with children. There are deep economic reasons

why the relative cost of childcare has gone up over time. And we just, it's something, society is not just the United States, you know't need to address if they see themselves as continuing multi-generational enterprises in which family life is important aspiration. And we just sort of have to get over a certain level of libertarianism about these things. I saw a statistic last week tweeted out by my friend Rob Henderson that said 50% of US singletons are neither looking for casual dates nor a long-term relationship. 50% of people that see it all.

That's it. Yeah, 50% of it that blows my mind. That's one of those things that makes me wonder if people are telling the truth. Yeah, maybe. I mean, you don't know. But at the very least, even if you account for a turn of variance, it's a lot of people. It is.

Unless it was, I don't know, a weirdly really ugly and imposing researcher that was like, so do you want to date? Do you want a lot of relationship or a casual one? Oh, no, thank you. Yeah, not for me. Not for me. Not for me. I'm thinking of going into being religious institutions. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, vast majority of human history, right, we were living off the land.

We're talking about hunter-gatherer bands. We're talking about little agricultural communities. We're talking about peasant farmers. And you're dealing with a world in which more people means less prosperity, right? So there's extraordinary statistics that will show you that after the black plague, we just go up in Western Europe because the worst land goes out of cultivation and everybody just sort of like grabs the best farms and you can pasture your cows instead of needing to eat like weird black bread all the time. And it's great. And that is so deep in our psyche for good reason, because that was most of human history

that people tend to think in those terms. But if you look at a modern economy, what are most people doing? We are privileged to be podcasters. We're like chatting on the internet to entertain and inform other people. If we're working class, we are maybe cooking food or cleaning up or taking care of people in a hospital setting. If we're professionals, we also may work in hospitals. We may work in schools. We might be architects, but we're doing things for each other. And the more people that there are, the richer, deeper, the market is that we have.

I've been doing, I do a podcast. I've been appearing on a lot of people's other shows. We've been doing them in English, which is great, because that's the language I speak. But English is a great podcasting medium because so many people speak English, right? That you don't need to appeal to 40% of the English-speaking population to have a good show, right?

You can serve a niche audience. It could be hundreds of thousands of people and that's still a trivial fraction of English speakers. If we wanted to try to have you know podcasts in I don't know what, Danish. Swahee, you live with something in. It's hard, right? It's like it's hard to have a vibrant, podcasting environment in something like that, right? And for in-person services, the same is true, right? If you got a tiny town, you want to run a restaurant there, like that's fine, good for you.

But it's going to have to be very generic, right? Hopefully a nice place, you know, friendly, homey. But you can't specialize in one kind of food. If you've got a big city, right, you can be the greatest ramen shop in the world, right? You can pick a thing and try to excel at it. And you can have a much more productive economy because not everyone has to serve everything.

And that's sort of modern day prosperity, but that's a very new kind of environment and it's not the way people are used to thinking. Why is it important for America to be number one in the world? Remembering, I don't have a dog in this fight, beautifully being British, being British, I can play devil's advocate as much as I want today. So why should America be number one? Why is it important? I think the British example, though, is actually very relevant to this.

The United Kingdom was the sort of number one power in the world for quite a while. And that stopped being the case. But I don't think that England's leaders and population were indifferent to that question. Right? If the British Empire had been replaced by Nazi Germany as a world's number one power, that would have been really bad. Right? And so one reason that, you know, decolonization and all that process was an acceptable outcome for Britain is that it was going to the United States. And if we were saying, okay, America is not going to be the number one power in the world anymore, it's going to be Finland, it's going to be the nice Canadians who hold the door open for you.

You know, I might be singing a different tune here. I'm not like a hyper nationalist, but you look at the real world and what we are dealing with there. And the alternative to American leadership is quite a bit worse than the United States. On almost any dimension that you want to talk about. And we see things that are happening domestically. They've got people in concentration camps in Xinjiang. They are breaking their agreements with Hong Kong regarding local democracy there, but they're also Externalizing their political power. I just think I made a big impression on me. I'm a big Pro basketball fan watch the NBA a lot and I saw Wow

I saw you know a coach. I think I think it was Deremory from the Houston Rockets and he tweeted in English in America, solidarity with protesters in Hong Kong and China has already banned Twitter domestically, right? So he's using a platform that's illegal there and the Chinese cut NBA off from broadcast in China to retaliate. And then there were all these criticisms.

And so LeBron James says, like, oh, he really shouldn't have said that. And that's not because LeBron is like a bad guy. You know, he, in US domestic politics has been a real leader on a lot of issues, thoughtful person. But, you know, he's a business too. And he needs the China market, and they need him to not be critical of anything that's happening there.

So Chinese speech norms are coming into American sports leagues. Mercedes Benz did an advertisement a few years ago, and it quoted the Dalai Lama about something. You know, when there was something dumb, right? I mean, you got a Buddhist monk and they're like, so buyer, fancy car. But the Chinese government threw a fit and the CEO of Dimeler ends up apologizing

for this offense that they gave to the Chinese people. And again, that's crazy. I mean, why shouldn't a German auto executive quote the Dalai Lama if he wants to? Pen America, this happened after my book came out, but Pen America did a report about Chinese censorship of Hollywood movies. And they said that it started with certain things

couldn't be shown in China, or certain scenes would have to be edited differently to go to China. But the Chinese government has gotten more aggressive. And now they say, look, if you want your movie to show here, you have to change it globally. And because the Chinese box office is now larger than the American box office, movie studios do it. Right?

They change plot points. And so in the Avengers movies, or Dr. Strange, right, there's a character of the ancient one. And in the comic books, there's a Tibetan monk, but in the Marvel Simnumac universe, it's till the Swin, with, you know, a white person, de-nationalized, because Disney is afraid that all Marvel distribution will be blocked in China, if they don't do it. So this is a little bit like Tiki-Tak stuff, movies, basketball players, but it speaks to the value system of the country that we are talking about.

And it's no joke, like, bad, and should be a subject of global concern. There's some really slippery slopes that you're at the top of there. You've got producers of movies on the other side of the planet. Like the biggest franchise, Marvel must be one of the biggest franchises of the last sort of 10 years. And you're changing globally, changing the storyline, like which is already written. Let's not forget that this isn't someone writing a script. It's an adaptation of a comic book.

Right. So that's a really, really good example and also quite terrifying. I'm gonna guess that you'll have seen the UK has just rolled back the 5G Huawei towers. Did you see this? I did. Yeah, so the UK that was in response to some concerns, some security concerns and stuff like that.

So you can see how this tip for tap game can escalate. Now, what you did this, now I will do that. Oh, you did this. Well, we did that. And I suppose as well that when you have private companies, you know, if if for some reason, the Avengers movie had offended China, that well, if, if, for some reason, the Avengers movie had offended China, that well, okay, who pays the price for that? Is there some new trade tariffs nationally placed on America because the choice of a private company? That's kind of crazy.

Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a difficult one. And, you know, you could have imagined a different world. When I was in college, I had a professor as a Welsh guy, I think, Glenn Morgan. And he wrote a book, and it was called The Idea of a European Superstate. And his thesis was that American global hegemony was unacceptable, that the United States is this like out of control country

with religious fanatics and blah blah blah, and you need to supercharge the European Unification Project so that the EU could be a global military and economic actor. It's a really interesting book, particularly from a particular moment in time in the early 2000s, but we know like world history is not gone in that direction, right? The UK, one of the largest European countries is leaving, and certainly the European country with the most military clout and tradition of playing on an international stage, there has been, among the remaining countries, a weakening of ties rather than a strengthening,

and a more and more sort of German accented Europe without the UK in it, which is good in some ways. I mean, there's a lot that's admirable about post-war Germany, but this is not an entity that is going to be a alternate beacon for sort of freedom and liberal values. The UK is too small. I mean, right. You need much, much more than 80 million people. And the other countries is a lot of

nice English-speaking countries that they, you know, New Zealand, Australia, all very admirable, but these are tiny, tiny places. So ultimately, it comes down to American leadership, tiny places. So ultimately it comes down to American leadership, hopefully in partnership with other countries, but American leadership or nothing, at least as I see. I was going to say, what if you were number two behind, let's say the EU, would you be so concerned or would you even be concerned? Is this, how much of this is patriotic, American number one, and how much of this is anything but China number one? I get it. It's both. I mean, I, I'm a believer in America and the American project, but it is definitely true that if we were talking about an increasingly integrated Europe of,

I don't know, 450 million people coming out, then I think we would be saying, I would be saying a different thing, right, about what is the international environment and we're talking about a sort of a two-legged stool of global liberalism with a different set of equities, managing that relationship would be different. I'm not like a super IR, international relations kind of guy.

All I really know is that is not the world, that's not the path that we have gone down. And one reason that we haven't gone down that path is, I don't think that it is in the nature of Europe as a project. It was never sold to people ever, as this is going to be an international military force. It's meant to be a project of economic prosperity and to avoid inter-European conflicts. Brexit, obviously, is a very complicated phenomenon, but part of it there is just a sense,

I think, among many British people that the project had gone beyond the scope of what they'd intended to sign up for, right? Trying to get some better export markets, suddenly you have all these immigrants. I don't know. I like immigrants, but it is true that that is a different thing. And you know, so what's not going to happen? Whereas the United States, I think, has had global leadership aspirations for a long time,

implicitly in the 19th century, and explosively throughout the 20th century. And I think it's something that we can rally ourselves to. And then in the opposite, as we've sort of gone into Donald Trump, you know, Donald Trump talks a lot about greatness, right? But he's really giving a sort of little America vision, right, in which we don't participate in the alliances. We don't uphold values abroad.

We cut off immigration and trade, you know, both domestically and internationally, and then you sort of have this ethnic conception of Americanness, an exclusionary conception. And that's been a current in American politics for a long time, but normally a minority current, right? Southern segregationist politicians had influence for a long time, but did not win national elections. They did not lead the country. And Trump is taking us down this path to being a kind of a lesser country,

but it also pulls apart at the fabric of the country to not uphold those kind of abstract ideas that can knit us together when we're at our best. Getting onto the immigration point, I think this is going to be a real point of contention for many people to read one billion Americans. What is your proposal to get from 3.30 to one billion? How many are you going to breed? How many are we going to import? You know, I mean, I don't think it's an either or in a certain sense because there's strong complementarities. A lot of the people working in childcare are immigrants.

So what I say about immigration is just that immigration is incredibly underrated. You ask normal people about immigration, as you'd say, normal people, the median voter of that immigration. She has a lot of concerns. She's not against it necessarily, but she has a lot of concerns about economic impact, about crime, about schools, about all kinds of things. You ask economists, right? You find the most immigration skeptical, prominent economists in America, George Borjas, up at Harvard. He's cited by Jeff Sessions, by Stephen Miller,

the restrictions they love him. So his research project, he claims on a big thing that a huge, totally uncontrolled influx of Cuban refugees into Miami hurt the wages of non-Cuban, Hispanic people who don't have a high school degree. Right, so that's not nobody, but that's like 30% of the population of Miami, 8% of the population of the United States globally fits that view.

So among experts, even the restrictionists are kind of optimistic about immigration. And among normal people, there's a lot of pessimism, a lot of skepticism at immigration. So I think the real issue is to say, look, what are the most politically feasible channels we can find to increase the number of people who are able to move here? And we can't totally know a priori. We have to find it out. But one thing we do know is that when you select immigrants based on their sort of education and language skills and likelihood of labor market success.

That's more politically popular. That's how Canada and Australia have larger levels of immigration than we do. There's sort of detailed surveys taking place in Europe that show countries with more skilled immigrants are sort of happier with it. So I do think we should make that change, which is associated with the political right

in the United States. But they want to say, well, let's have fewer immigrants, but make them highly skilled. I say no, like let's have higher skilled immigrants, and then have more of them, right? The other thing is, I think we should be willing to an extent to cater to people's prejudices, right? If people want to say, I'm fine with Canadians moving here. Like, let's open the door to Canadians, right? You can have free trade agreements in goods where we don't say, oh, it has to be non-discriminatory.

You can pick the countries you're comfortable with that you think will respect environmental and labor rights, things like that. And it can be the same, like we should look at it. You know, we should, this should solve these people living in England and in your tiny houses and ventless dryers and come here. Life is good. We've got ice cubes and giant sodas and big ass road trips. It's amazing. And I think on specific terms, I think one thing we should really do is look at local option for immigration, which is to say there are mayors of some cities, primarily

in the Midwest, that have lost population. And they are saying, look, we would love to have more immigrants in Cleveland, in Akron, in Buffalo, in Springfield. And we should let localities that want to sponsor sort of extra tier of immigrants. Right? So if you're the people living in the belt where they hate immigrants, like, sure, okay, like, do the immigrants even want to move to West Virginia, Northern Alabama? Like, probably not, right, to be frank about it. And let them come to the places where people see that it can revitalize communities that have been hollowed out by de-industrialization and could really benefit from some of the best

and brightest people in the world moving to them. Is economic prosperity worth diluting down American culture though? So if someone is American, if someone's Mexican, they're not American, and if they become an American citizen, that doesn't change the fact that their culture will be that of Mexico. So if you were to import, you know, 100 million Mexicans and then, you know, a couple of million Canadians and then some Cubans and all the rest of it, you can end up being a minority within your own country. Well, you know, but that is America's culture, right? is people coming from all kinds of different places. I think it's reasonable to say, look, you don't want to let any one particular other place

sort of predominate, right? I mean, you wouldn't want to add, I think, 300 million people from India. Not to the same thing wrong with people from India, but then it's like, okay, that maybe isn't America anymore, right? But if you have a bunch of people from India and a bunch of people from Mexico and a bunch of people from the Philippines and people from Africa and people from South America, right? That's America.

That's the American story. Once upon a time, this was a country of English religious dissenters, right? That's the sort of original core proposition of the United States. But we have evolved so far beyond that, so many times, big waves of migration from Germany, from Ireland, you know, mainstream Protestants, Catholics come here, Asians, Latin Americans, you know, some of my family is Eastern European Jews from Russia and Poland. Some of my family is Cuban and that's a very American sort of family story. My wife's family is like long time, you know, Ulster Scott's, whatever you call them, you know, 18th century came in. So then our son is like even more blended. And that's America, like at its core is just like a lot of weird shit coming together.

Downstream I can see how immigration would then eventually blend into a culture, but you're going to get pockets of people, the particular people from particular countries are going to find microcosms where other people from their country are as well. And I can see no matter how progressive you are with regards to immigration, if you become a minority within your own city, I can see that being very impopular. Yeah, I mean, look, you know, this has always been a sort of question about immigrant niches. And, you know, I mean, so I grew up in New York, which is a very immigrant and heavy city, and is full of places like that, right? I mean, as a sort of Native born American,

Native English speaker, I was not a minority, quote, unquote, in my city, but you go to parts of Jackson Heights, and you're like, oh, this is the subcontinent, right? Then you go two stops further down on the seven train, and you're in China. And it's part of what, you know, people who love New York love about it.

There's also a reason lots of people don't love New York. And, you know, one thing I wanna say is that we should, I think we should push back against the idea that we need to be homogenous and then we need to exclude people to have a successful country. But I also want to push back against cosmopolitan liberals' tendency to deride people who have different preferences from theirs.

Like it's fine. It's just a fact of life that people for arbitrary reasons, like some people would find it incredibly boring to live in a very ethnically homogenous place because they would say there's no good restaurants here. I love my Mexican food, I love my Japanese food. And it's the kind of people who, like, we'll say, the greatest thing to happen to Britain is that now there's all these Indian restaurants, right? Like it's way better. Other people don't think that way. The greatest thing to happen to Britain is that now there's all these Indian restaurants, right?

It's way better. Other people don't think that way. Some people don't like to try new stuff. They don't like spicy food. That's fine. That's part of accepting diversity is that some people don't have that kind of cosmopolitan, hyper openness, easily bored sort of mindset and mentality. And you know, that's why that's one reason why having local differentiation and immigration policy,

I think can be useful and important. One of the things I try to show in the book though is that there is an economic interlinkage, right? That we have seen an incredible decline in the rural population in the United States over the past couple of generations. And that's because, I mean, it's because of several different things, but one main factor is all throughout human history, you look thousands of years, right? People leave the countryside

to go live in the big city. But how many children are born there in the first place? Makes a big difference, right? If you have three kids and one of them moves to the big city, well, you have stable population in the countryside. If you have four and one moves to the big city, you have growth in both places. If you have two and one goes to the city, then your countryside is shrinking. And what people are doing in rural areas economically, is they are engaged in primary production, right? Farm, timber, mining, things like that. The market for that stuff is in the cities, right?

So there's a cultural contrast between the kind of people who like small towns and the kind of people who like big cities, but like I don't want to starve to death because I have no food. And farmers don't want to be broke because nobody's eating it. And we really are in it together as a country and having a more dynamic, more rapidly growing place,

both in terms of domestic family life and in terms of immigration, is like a win-win for everyone. And America has become a lot of countries, frankly, but the United States too, has become so consumed with domestic cultural conflict that it is making it hard for us to see what are sort of concrete, like what really matters, right? And one thing that I think is useful about thinking in international terms, thinking in

global terms, is it helps remind us of a sort of sense of common purpose and togetherness and the fact that we want to have, you know, mutually beneficial arrangements with each other to defend certain things like everybody in America like thinks it's bad to have. The stuff we were talking about earlier, you know, exporting of Chinese censorship, like nobody wants that, right?

And nobody wants us to be poor. Nobody wants people to not be able to raise children because it's impossible to get a daycare, right? Like there's a lot that we have in common and our politics has become incredibly focused on what differentiates us on symbolic levels. And I think we would be happier in our day to day lives, as well as in our politics,

if we could focus on some of the bigger picture things. Totally makes sense to say that if you can't sort your own shit, why should you be focused on trying to import some people from a different country? Like if you guys are going absolutely crazy at the moment, and it's just pandemonium, which, you know, from the UK looking over, it does look quite a lot of chaos is happening at the

moment. It's maybe, maybe you need to kind of clean the, clean the bedroom before you talk about adding an extension on in the garage type thing. Well, there's something to that. By the same token now, I feel like, you know, Americans have gotten so hard of how we've gotten off the rails is people becoming so obsessed with the idea that things are terrible here, like Trump running around talking about American carnage. The fact that lots of people from around the world would like to come here tells us something, right? Like about

to come here, tells us something, right? Like about our own society and its value, and to sort of recognize some of the blessings that we have fundamentally, and that it's worth actually trying to keep them, and not just tear ourselves apart in like a small-minded conflict about, you know, the people who drive pickup trucks and the people who drive preesses.

I drive a preess. I live in a big city. I do. I have a dog in this fight, but is it actually the most important thing? Or conversely, just to say to progressives, right? It's obviously true that racism has structured American society for a long time and continues to in important ways. And people have important claims for justice and for grass that they want to make. At the same time, people move here voluntarily from the West Indies, from Latin America, from Africa, from Asia, knowing these negative facts about American society, but also seeing a lot of positives to it. And when it comes to, okay, Trump is being cruel. He's mistreating these would be immigrants.

People on the left see that, that's wrong, that that's bad, that we should be nice to them. But you should also learn the lesson of the fact that they want to come here, right? That America has something valuable to offer to the world, and that people on the right who want to be patriotic and want to have pride in the country and want to say that America is good and we should all have little flags in our yards. That there's something to that, right?

And then to say to those people, well, look, if you want to be patriotic, if you want to talk about American ideals, then you have an obligation to try to live up to them. Like you yourself have not done anything great, as an individual. It's like, what do we do? What are the ideas that we stand for and how can we live them? It does seem like the messaging's got very confused and conflated, I think. You've got people on the left sounding like people

on the right 25 years ago, and you've got people on the right who I don't even know what they sound like anymore, but you're correct. Black people in America are the most affluent black people on the planet. That's a reason for people from other black countries to want to move there. So for me, as a good example, I'm British, like if I want to come to America at the moment, I can get an E2 visa and I need to get about $150,000 together to invest into a company, either an existing one or a new one,

or I need to be an O1, which is person of extraordinary abilities, I need to be in the top one to 2% in my field in the world. And it's podcasted pretty good, but it's, you know, there's some big hurdles for me to get over that. Yeah. Am I, is a dog going to be easier for me to step through? Yeah, I mean, you know, one of my sort of deep inspirations for this was a long time ago, we were launching Vux.com, you know, we're hiring people.

And we got a resume from a woman who was a health reporter, Canadian born. At the time she applied, she was living in the UK. We read her clips. They were really good. She had a good plan for coverage. We were like, all right, we're going to hire you. Then we took that over to the HR department. They were like, whoa.

We got to talk about visas. And in a weird way, it had never occurred to me because the immigration debate is always about like Mexicans and kids. Oh, those people, you know, like nobody is ever like vocalizing a concern that Canadian journalists. Too many British people coming over here. I'm going to come here from London and like right, hot takes on the internet, especially because we have free trade and takes, right? Like I can read Guardian columns, I can read what's a Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, like your podcast will play in America, my podcast plays in Britain. So like, what's the point to even?

And like, who knows what the point is? You know, like, oh, so we got it done, right? We got her an O1 visa and she is in fact extraordinary. But it was, it was a big pain in the ass. And to what end? Like, nowhere in the pain in the ass process was there actually like an angry, immigrant hating person being like, America in the pain in the ass process was there actually like an angry immigrant hating person being like, America for the Americans.

We don't need these Canadian health reporters. You know, it's just a kind of bureaucratic autopilot because we cap the total number of visas. So, to ease up on what should be the easy cases, Canadian health journalists, British podcasters, like why not? Why not, right? But right now, you would have to take a visa away from a Filipino person or a Mexican

or an Indian American. So, that becomes its own contentious politics, right? Where because we've decided to limit the total number of visas. You can't expand the sort of no-brainers. It's like, oh, one, top, top 1%. Why not top 10%? Who would be her? 90th percentile is pretty good, right?

If my podcast was the, if my book, right, if 1 billion Americans becomes a top 10% book, I'll be pretty pleased. Like, that's, that's good stuff. We could use those people. I heard from a friend who got an O1 a couple of years ago, and his attorney is one of these absolutely shit-hot, very, very smart nose all the tricks in the book attorneys. And he flew, I want to say Madrid. So he flew to the US Embassy in Madrid to do that because there's like weird different allocations and difficulty levels. English guy, sorry, yeah, English guy applying to a one in America, but went via Madrid because that's the case. So you're right, like this, this sort of level of bureaucracy, and all that bureaucracy does really as far as I see is put a intellectual hurdle or a cash hurdle on that, because if you've got enough money or enough smarts, you can get around

rules. It's one of the things I'm increasingly learning as I get older, but all that rules are is just a problem to be solved. If you put more rules in the way, then you select for a particular type of people who can bend those rules. And it expresses this kind of paranoia about immigrants that is visible in our political culture. I looked at this legislative proposal called the Rays Act, that President Trump has endorsed, that's written by Tom Cotton. You know, it wants to change how the immigration system works. They say, okay, we want a merit-based system. We're going to select people based on the skills. You know, fine, it's not a crazy idea. Then you dive into the details and it is so stringent that like the MVP of the NBA,

not to make everything about the NBA, he wouldn't have qualified as sufficiently skilled because unless he could get a top 10% test of English as a foreign language score, he needs those English language points and you say, well, why? I mean, he speaks English, okay. But it's not great. But it's a basketball player. It's fine that his English isn't great. Plus, he'll learn.

Somebody comes here when they're 21 years old and their English is only so-so. Like, it'll get better. There's no problem there. Or you look at, into the same thing, well, you get extra points for winning Olympic medals, but only in individual sports.

No way. You get extra points for winning a Nobel Prize, but only a science prize. Like, Like, Like, Like,

Like, Like, what is the concern? Like, our country is gonna be flooded with Nobel Prize in Literature winners, who are literature, right? Like, what is the concern? Like, our country is gonna be flooded with Nobel Prize in Literature winners, who are gonna be what? Like, an excessive burden on society, they're gonna drive down the pay for a domestic novelist. Like, it doesn't make sense.

And I think if you put it to them, they would say, okay, you're right, right? But they're working with a mindset that is so terrified of immigration than instead of asking like, okay, what's the real problem here? Like, who do we really need to exclude? They're doing the opposite. They're like, let's exclude everyone. And then let's think of a couple scenarios in which somebody could come in. But look, you think about the other way, okay. You don't want somebody to come who's 60 years old and they're only gonna work a couple years,

and then they're gonna go on, we call it Social Security, I don't know what, it's an old age pension scheme. So okay, you want younger people to come in. You don't want people who are gonna be totally impoverished, or maybe you want some refugees, because that really is an act of charity, which is fine, that's good. But you don't

want your typical immigrant to be somebody who's going to have absolutely no wages. So that's good. Okay, you want people with job offers. You want people, you know, you got a college degree. Like, that's good. Come on in. You went a Nobel Prize. I don't care what Nobel Prize. Like, come on in. Maybe even if you're just on a short list, book or prize short list, come on in. We should be looking for reasons to say yes to people. It's not to say that you need to open the borders of totally uncontrolled flows, but just like there's

a lot of good people out there in the world. Many of them don't want to come to America. A lot of people find this country to be off-putting in various ways. But if they do want to come, like that's great. And that's like, that's how we got to where we are. It's like all kinds of people came here. I know there's a lot of room by vacant square mileage, but isn't there a housing shortage in America? Where's everyone going to live? Yeah, so this is, here we go. This is my true passion in life is nitty gritty about housing policy.

So we've got a whole chapter in the book about this. The planning paradigm in the United States is very localized. So these decisions about where you're allowed to add more houses are made essentially on the neighborhood level. And if you think about it, there's been this apartment construction on my block for the past year, so it just wrapped up. It was super annoying.

It's really loud. It stirred up all kinds of rats who started running around the block. And when it's done, the company had clothes of the street to put cranes in. I mean, all that annoyance is experienced locally. But there's also benefits, right, to the city. Like more people will live here. We have a broader tax base. We're going to have a little bit more affordability.

We're going to have extra jobs. But the benefits are very broad and diffuse. and the harms are very, very local. So when you make the decision about what to allow superduper local, people err on the side of saying no to extra houses. When you broaden it out, in Canada, they make planning decisions at the provincial level. In Japan, they do it at the national level. And so they say yes, right? Because you incorporate the broader scope of interests.

So we've seen some changes in that direction in West Coast states just over the past couple of years. So it hasn't had a huge impact on the built environment yet. But by shifting that planning decision up to a higher level, they are now opting in Washington and Oregon and California, but especially in Oregon to say yes, just sort of more housing, and that creates the opportunities. We have plenty of space for more people, but we need a planning paradigm that makes places for them.

I'm going to say the house is going to have to come before the immigration. You're not have to have to have. Well, yes and no, you know, it's a little bit paradoxical because immigrants work very heavily in the building trades. So get yourself over here, bring a travel and a. I mean, right now we're experiencing a shortage of people actually to build houses happening in the US right now because of some of Trump's policies. Obviously that can be reworked. I mean, people can retrain, they can do different things.

But at the moment, it's like we don't have enough carpenters, which is one of the reasons we don't have enough houses. What about second order effects then? If we can get the houses right, what about increased rent, water shortages, traffic pollution, overcrowding? Yeah, we've just got tons of water in this country.

This is like, America is a bananza of fresh water. So that's fine. Traffic is a real concern. A lot of cities have bad traffic jams. If you have way more people, you're going to get worse traffic jams. Some of that is improving your public transport, things like that. But I think really we do have to look at the sort of congestion pricing paradigms that they haven't stock home in Oslo and London.

I think maybe another British city, Singapore was the sort of originator of these things. It works well. Every place has been tried. It's been very contentious at first with a lot of naysayers and a lot of doubts, but it's been fairly politically durable. And all the European cities that have done it, you know, even as parties sort of change hands, they tweak the system, you know, as we should in a democracy, but stick with it. So New York is going to implement congestion pricing soon. They have been a little bit tied up with pandemics slightly and not all that focused on commuters to lower them.

But hopefully, when the dust clears from that, we're going to see that this is a, I have this joke, it's like the only political issue people actually care about is traffic and parking. They like to talk about other things. So, you know, I get it, right? It's a pain in the ass to be stuck in traffic. But this is also a technical problem that has technical solutions. Have you ever been to Dubai? No. So, Dubai is a... But I went to the airport. Oh, everyone's been through. You've got to go through the airport.

You've got to go through the airport. I mean, you can see, perfect example. The airport, the efficiency, the size of it, the mueness of it, you can see what it's like. But I was struck having recently been to New York and then going to Dubai shortly afterward. I saw what happened when you have modern building materials, a modern understanding of traffic flow, a city which is built to get bigger, not one that you just presume is going to stay the same size as it is now and no new people are going to be there. And you can

be doing 70 miles an hour on a 10 lane either side motorway. And look at, look on the little map on Uber and it says three minutes to your destination and you like we're doing 70 miles an hour how can it be three minutes to your destination and then sure enough the driver pulls off peels off at this junction does a little loop loop and then deposits you outside of the restaurant that you're going to because every different section has been designed for for maximum flow for maximum volume. And then you go to somewhere like LA, and you have traffic in different towns, almost different cities, like you can go and in San Bernardino Valley, be suffering the effect of traffic jam that's on the coast. And you're like, this can't be the, what's going on? So I can see, you know, you add in an extra few people, people are gonna go to the popular places.

I know Joe Rogan and everyone's doing mass exes as out of LA at the moment, but like, it's gonna take a little bit of time for that to slow down. People are gonna go to New York, people are gonna go to LA, people are gonna go to Dallas, I think, which is like the third most popular, so second most popular city. That's gonna get worse, and then pollution as well.

Wait, well, this is like this kind of paradox, right? To say it's like, well, nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded, right? A guy grew up in New York, it's weird to me. Like, I find the level of crowding there to be unpleasant, even though it's what I grew up with. That said, just like empirically, people keep going there, right?

I remember I was pitching the book, and so I took the train up to New York, and I was in Midtown, where my publisher's office is. And Midtown is the part of New York that even New Yorkers hate. And they say, well, nobody goes there. And so I'm there, and it's terrible. Everybody says it's terrible because they're right. But one of the things that's so terrible about it, I mean, again, not now, Ms. Pinty.

If you're publishers, I've got to send this to your publishers. So when they listen, I'll do this. They're going to be saying, do you know what, must you just say it on that episode? No, but they're not against it either. But it's so crowded. Like all these people are there, right? And so it's like, well, why is everybody there, right? And well, we're there for each other. Like I was there to have to meet it. They're there so people can have meetings with them. It's where the transportation hubs go. It's where the other people's offices are. And it's great,

right? It's this incredible beating heart of commerce and prosperity. And nobody has to be there, right? You've always had the book publisher, I don't know. They could be in a mountain retreat someplace. But that's where they want to go. And what's been limiting people's ability to pour into New York is just the price of houses there, same as London, right? These global world cities, they're almost like black holes of growth and attraction, right? And like

foreign people like want to get a second house there, right? So they can come and drop by and have their Pietta tear and stuff. We're Russian billionaires everywhere. And it's kind of crazy, but I mean, it shows that on some level, like more is more when it comes to growth and opportunity and things like that, even if there are traffic jams, right? So pollution, like pollution is a real thing. Like we should get people to drive electric cars.

We know how to do that. We've got to shut down coal plants. Like, I agree with all the like normal environmentalists stuff, except that like, I want to actually do that stuff and solve these problems and not have it wielded as an excuse to not have a growing economy or a growing society. Because like, they're right, like these technologies exist.

Like I've got my hybrid car five years ago, it's good, but it's like it's already outdated today. Like I'm using a little bit of gasoline, the people with the Chevy Valtz and stuff, they're using nothing. And like we can do that. We can zip around, no weird toxic fumes. I'm gonna, I got solar panels on my roof.

Like it's good. Like I'm a, I'm a, I say, I think I say somewhere in there that I'm against eco pessimism, right? But I'm, but I'm for the environment. Like people have worked really hard on trying to solve these problems. And unfortunately, we have not been aggressive enough at actually deploying the solutions that are available to us.

But that's like, that's in keeping with the themes of the book. We just got to do more stuff. It's the curse of the 20th century, at the other 21st century, that people love an exciting, vibrant, popular talking point like this. To, as you say, wield like a sword in debates with friends

or on the senate floor or whatever it might be. And you're like, right, okay, we've kind of got to the stage now when, when nothing gets done, you almost get bored when someone brings it up because you know, it's almost like a signal that it's not going to happen. Like the chance of the, the policy is probably made by the guy that's not talking about it. You know, the, the couple that always post their favorite couple photos when they're on holiday together, and you're like, that relationship's breaking up. That relationship's breaking down because it's a signal. My final question, your concern, your primary concern is about China.

I think anyone who fully understands the sort of threat that they pose quite rightly is concerned about that. In terms of population, I had a look at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a study that they recently did at start this year, said that China is facing its most precipitous decline in population in decades, and that China will be back under one billion by 2100. And there's huge swaths of millions of men that a single childless and have no way to have a family. That's the dream. I mean, that's what I'm saying.

We're at 2100, we're going to be at a billion. They're going to be under a billion. And that's it. America number one forever. But this is serious. I mean, I think it's worth looking at the way They're going to be under a billion. And that's it. America number one forever. But this is serious. I mean, I think it's worth looking at the way they are thinking about this in China.

They had this one child policy era, which people know of some of the cruelty that was involved with that. But the extent to which the Chinese policy community now views that as a huge mistake that has given this kind of, yeah, they now have this demographic momentum toward incredible aging and population shrinkage. Some of that is the legacy of the one child era, but some of it is just the knock-on effect. You're talking about people who have very few cousins, people who don't have a sister

who can help out with the kids, right? People who can't find a wife, because there's this match. I think it might be in the Washington Post that wrote this unbelievable article that broke down or like very personal stories about all of the different men and then some really cool sort of animated statistics and things as well.

But I remember seeing that, there's like a fat bit in the graph that's slowly reaching like I think it's maybe at the late 20s to 30s now and this is the age of some of the women in China and this big fat bit of the graph is going to pass 40 and then you correct, there's not a whole lot that can be done. I mean, it's really screwed up, and you think about how normal families operate, you assume, you know, like dating is hard, right? But you assume that like mathematically,

there's somebody out there for me, right? Not like, no, literally there isn't, right? Yes, that's like, we would say now, if your friend, he's depressed, he's like, oh, I'm never gonna meet a girl. And we'd say, no, no, you know what I'm talking about? But in China, you're like, no, actually you won't. I'm very sorry. That's not good.

And people rely on extended family networks for support when they have young kids at home. If that doesn't exist, it's very disruptive. And, you know, I mean, I think on one level, I'm glad that they're hitting some problems. On another level though, it's very sad, you know, when you hope to take and find a way to do better. This is of course one reason why it's not,

you know, good to have a totalitarian system of government because like a bad idea does not get fully aired in a discussion. I in shop and I in when it comes to this stuff right. Yeah, I mean it's it's good you know uh it's easy. I you meet people sometimes who'll be like oh I just went from LaGuardia to the awesome new airport in Beijing and it's like why can't we have a dictatorship that just comes up problems and gets things done but like sometimes what they get done is like really, really bad. And it is good to have a discussion and debate about ideas because the legacy of that particular

idea, I mean, it was bad in its moment and the long term. It's hard to fix. Have you considered portioning off a bit of Alaska and just taking loads of Chinese people there? Because that fixes both of your problems at once. Yeah, there's always interesting, Alaska things. I don't know if you know that Michael Chebon's not of all the Yiddish policemen's union, but it's basically like alternate history,

like what if they had just kind of built Israel in Alaska? Right, as a refugee, as you're talking about it. It's his idea that always kind of recurs to people because Alaska is just sitting there big and empty. Yeah. And I do think it's appealing. I mean, I would have to talk to some Alaskans. See what's going on in the eggs. Like, it wasn't talking about. Donald Trump going to buy Greenland at one point.

Yes. The possibility is of Greenland are quite large. I, you know, so I'm all for it. I think, I think originally we tried to buy Greenland about a hundred years ago, and we took what's now the US Virgin Islands instead. Shit deal. That was the deal. That was the deal that didn't know and think.

Shouldn't have gone. That was the deal that James made with us. But so I originally had a chapter about like, well, maybe we should have an accession process like the EU and, you know, maybe Jamaica will become the 51st state. We wound up cutting it because it was, I don't know, I couldn't really work out the details

to my satisfaction. But it's an interesting idea, fun to think about. Got you. Matthew, thank you very much for today, man. One million Americans will be linked in the show notes below anywhere else that people should go to check you stuff out You know I'm on box calm. I'm on Twitter Maddie Glacias. I love to see you there. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, man Thank you. Thank you.