Matthew Yglesias' "One Billion Americans: Exploring the Possibility of a Larger United States"

Tom Hughes: A very pertinent book for the modern United States.

United States on Oct 27, 2023

Amazon Customer: I liked the provocative but very well articulate idea the author proposes in his book. He used solid arguments and statistics to support his thesis. In some chapters it may feel like he takes a detour from the main topic to address other general social issues of American society but overall it’s an interesting read.

United States on Sep 30, 2023

Mark Schumaker: This books contains a lot of good ideas to improve our nation. Author Matt Yglesias discusses repopulating our declining cities in the northeast and midwest so that they can thrive again, repopulating rural towns so that it is easier to provide basic services like medical care and internet access, making housing more affordable, modifying the social safety net to promote marriage, providing universal childcare and paid holidays so that parents can work and care for children, making immigration more popular, moving selected federal agencies to the larger declining cities to provide a core of well paid jobs, and improving our transportation system to reduce traffic jams, promote mass transit, and improve air service. He also briefly discusses climate change. This review will concentrate on three topics.

Yglesias proposes to make it easier to marry and have children. Polls report that women want to have an average of about 2.5 children. Yglesias would eliminate “marriage penalties” in the social safety net. He proposes that the government provide a cash allowance for each child and paid parental leave from work. His grandest proposal is to expand the public school system...

United States on Feb 16, 2023

kevin: Fascinating take on how America should grow

Germany on Oct 12, 2020

Teach1: Mr. Yglesias has written a stunningly compelling book suggesting that all of America's current problems will go away if we just increase the population in the US to ONE BILLION PEOPLE. He argues that, with respect to density, we should not fear adding 6-700 million more people, because we will simply look and feel like the French.

He is convinced that America's greatness is solidly tied to more densely populated cities, with more highly motivated people. His arguments fit the current business model: We just need to keep building and manufacturing more gadgets, building more apartments, sticking duplexes, six-plexes and mother-in-law homes in on every single home site across the nation.

He worries that we will be unable to compete technologically, politically or militarily with China's and India's huge populations that already have reached the magic BILLION.

His data suggest that America's native born fertility rate hit a low of 1.76 in 2017, and that we will need to rely on immigration to build a future US population of ONE BILLION. The book does not mention that we have added over 100 million people to America's population since the 1970s, and that with...

United States on Sep 24, 2020