population, nor does he look at the effect such policies have had in countries where they have been implemented. The tell is simple enough: At no point does Yglesias try to quantify the effect of any of his preferred policies on the size of the U.S. With the world’s population expected to start shrinking in about 45 years, there’s no way that the United States is going to repeat that feat. To put it another way: China did manage to grow from 330 million people to more than one billion people, but it did so against a backdrop of 180 years of global population growth.
For comparison, the aggregate population of Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras and the rest of Central America is not much more than 205 million. Yglesias himself concedes that the concept is “impossible and absurd.” The arithmetic is pretty simple: There are about 330 million Americans right now, which means that getting to one billion would mean adding 670 million net new humans. Even if everybody wanted America to grow to one billion people, it would never happen. Conservatives think the country is already full, he notes, while liberals tend to think the same thing about their own towns and cities. He also admits that there’s no real political constituency for such a policy. Matthew Yglesias, the author of “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger,” thinks it would be great if America were that populous. There will never be one billion Americans. ONE BILLION AMERICANS The Case for Thinking Bigger By Matthew Yglesias
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