Can you advocate for climate solutions and dramatic population growth at the same time? Or are the two ideas mutually exclusive? Matthew Yglesias argues that while electoral politics is a zero-sum game, policy is not. And any two priorities can be reconciled to craft a win-win, provided both sides accept the premise that we need to take action on climate change.
Matthew Yglesias is the cofounder of Vox, host of The Weeds Podcast, journalist and author of the national bestseller, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Matt joins Ross and Paul to discuss the premise of his book, explaining why it’s crucial for the US to grow its population and commit to keeping our #1 status in the world. He shares his liberal approach to this conservative idea, describing how immigration makes us stronger and what we can do to support families with children.
Matthew goes on to offer insight on the dysfunction of American federalism, discussing how a shared goal would create more constructive politics, and why it’s shortsighted to invoke climate change as an argument against population growth. Listen in for Matthew’s take on why we need right of center solutions to climate change and learn how we can prioritize both population growth and climate solutions in a way that moves America forward.
Resources
One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias
The Idea of a European Superstate by Glyn Morgan
Bryan Caplan on Reversing Climate Change S2EP2
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration by Bryan Caplan
‘Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing’ in PEN America
Brad Plumer at The New York Times
Matthew on Conversations with Tyler EP104
Getting to Yes: How to Negotiate Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
David Roberts on Reversing Climate Change S2EP3
Benji Backer on Reversing Climate Change EP074
Bob Inglis on Reversing Climate Change EP086
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, welcome to season two of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now in launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com/noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what Nori [unclear] are reading that week? Be a part of a Nori book club? Get special access to Nori events? Go take a look at patreon.com/noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean and that kind of way that, you know, we like to do this, this list of goodies is subject to change, and we’d very much like your feedback.
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Hello and welcome to Reversing Climate Change. I’m Ross Kenyon. Paul Gambill, CEO of Nori and one of my fellow co-founders, is here with me. Hi, Paul.
Paul Gambill: Hey, Rosco.
Ross Kenyon: Hello. We have the distinct pleasure of having Matthew Yglesias on today, co-founder of Vox, host of the podcast The Weeds, writer, journalist, and author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Hey, Matt.
Matthew Yglesias: Hello. Hello.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for coming on the show. We’re so happy to have you.
Matthew Yglesias: I’m really glad to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, indeed. Well, this book — we have thoughts about it. We care about this issue a lot, we think it’s really important, and we like that you tried to thread a very unique needle on it. And we were thinking that maybe the best way to get started is if you could run us through the basics of what you’re trying to accomplish with it.
Matthew Yglesias: Okay. So the point of One Billion Americans is that there should be one billion Americans, you know? And so you can say, like, why, why one billion Americans? The basic reason: look, we have a world of sort of growing geopolitical competition with China in particular, and to an extent India coming up there too. It’s because we finally have rapid population growth in some very large countries that have historically been quite poor. This is mostly good. It has reduced poverty around the world. You know, it’s something to celebrate. But the sort of dream of the ’90s, that economic growth in China would lead to liberalization and democratization and an embrace of a rules-based global order, that has totally not happened.
And no American political leaders are saying, oh, that’s fine, we’ll just be number two, let’s submit to Chinese hegemony. But they’re also not talking realistically about what you’re going to do about it, right? So, like, Obama said, well, we need to win the future with — I don’t know what it was — like, some grant for people to get technical education at community college. And, you know, I think it’s a fine idea, we should do that, but it’s ridiculous compared to the scale of the problem. Trump was like, maybe going to ban TikTok, or then now maybe he won’t, and, you know, maybe we should, maybe we shouldn’t. But taking on China’s video meme apps is, like, not — it’s not going to get it done.
You know, if we think about the fundamentals, it’s like China is about Mexico in terms of per capita living standards, maybe Bulgaria depending on how you look at it — better food than Bulgaria, though, so maybe closer to Mexico in that sense. But there’s this huge great power because there’s 1.2 billion Chinese people. So I say, let’s embrace [unclear]. You look historically, right, the United States: really big deal in the world. Canada: nice country, not a big deal. Why? We’re a big deal because we have ten times their population, and we have ten times the population because our leaders historically made it a priority to get people to move here.
And so I think we should look going forward. We should support families with children. We should do more in terms of paid leave, in terms of preschool, in terms of child allowance, so that people can have two to three kids per family, which is what they say they want, instead of one or two, which is what they actually have right now. And we should be more open to immigration, and we should see this as the real American greatness agenda, is to grow the population. We’re not obviously going to triple it overnight because it takes time to build houses and things, but we should aim for aggressive population growth rather than settling for stagnation and national decline. And that is the book, and this is usually when people start yelling at me about climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, I’m going to save that downstream just a little bit. What I really like about this book is that you state your assumptions and your values very close to up front in the book, which I find is weirdly uncommon, so I do admire that. But you chose to frame this book in geopolitical terms, about world leadership and competition between countries, which — I associate you and Vox as being a relatively progressive outfit, but that doesn’t seem to be something that we think of. In fact, sometimes I think of the left, I almost get the sense that they wouldn’t mind if the United States gave up its world hegemon status. So I don’t know, how has the reaction been to this portion of it? How did you land there?
Matthew Yglesias: Well, so, if I can play psychiatrist, I think a lot of people on the left would be more comfortable with a world in which they themselves lived in a country that was more like Canada or New Zealand or Denmark — like, a country that just doesn’t have hegemonic aspirations. They’re not comfortable with that aspect of the American national project, and so they don’t like to talk about it. At the same time, when you kind of bear down, are there people in America who say it will be better if China was hegemonic? Would it be better if we had a global military hegemon that cared even less about human rights than the United States, that was more autocratic, more racist? And, like, no, right? Nobody actually thinks that. It’s just also not something that progressive-minded people want to embrace.
And, you know, I had a professor a long time ago by the name of Glyn Morgan, and he wrote a really interesting book fifteen years ago, and it’s called The Idea of a European Superstate. And it was encouraging the European Union to become more integrated, much more integrated, and have, like, a single European military entity, you know? And so there would be, like, EU aircraft carriers and an EU nuclear arsenal and European, like, Euro Navy SEALs. And his whole argument — you know, this is the Bush era — his argument was that, like, America has become this, like, quasi-rogue state and we can’t count on the Americans anymore, so we need to do it for ourselves. And that’s a super interesting argument, and if I were European I think I would be doing takes all the time about how Professor Morgan had that right.
But one way or another, that’s not what happened, right? We got Brexit. We’ve had a sort of loosening of the European common border strategy. And, you know, so from the American perspective it’s like you sort of got to take it or leave it, right? There isn’t some other, like, nicer country that’s going to come along and be hegemon. We’re not going to have Iceland become the world’s number one power. There’s only two real contenders, and America is by far, I think, the better horse to bet on.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. Okay. Already anticipating angry emails, we’ll see what happens with that. Okay, we’ll go into the position now where people are going to start yelling about climate change. I’ll play that role for you here.
Matthew Yglesias: Thank God.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, I’ll step into the breach and do this for you. So, a lot of people that we speak with, they tend to have very strong sympathies towards degrowth economics, about humans making a strategic retreat, you could even say, from growth, from consumption, and living simpler lives. This is definitely more of a wizardly rather than prophet approach: we develop technology, we invite people in, they — immigrants — start businesses, they develop technology, we’re all better off, and we develop new alternatives to polluting enterprises. Is that broadly your position?
Matthew Yglesias: Yes. I mean, you know, I think there’s a lot that can be said about degrowth. I tend not to spend that much of my time focusing on why it’s wrong, because, you know, I think of the actual politics of the United States, like, the big issue is that the American government is doing, like, barely anything to combat climate change, and we should in fact be doing a lot. But I think what happens is that because, you know, we have this tremendous gap between sort of culture and politics, right, so it feels to a lot of people that it’s like, we’ve been talking about climate change for all these years and we’re not solving the problem, so obviously the problem is borderline unsolvable, and therefore we need degrowth somehow, and that will solve it.
But, like, the truth is that what we need to do — it’s frustrating that we’re not doing it, but we need to do the things that boring, sensible people have been saying we need to do for, like, a bajillion years. Like, we need to price pollution externalities and we need to invest money in technology. It’s, like, super tedious. It’s like, people want the answer to be more exciting than that because the politics is hard, but it’s just hard. And if we price externalities and invest in technology effectively, then we can have a prosperous, growing society that mitigates climate change in a responsible way. And if we don’t do that stuff, like, asking everyone to go live on a farm and compost or something, like, wear thicker sweaters — it’s like, that’s not a real idea. It doesn’t mean anything. Like, the country of Vietnam is not going to stop industrializing because American environmentalists would like them to, right?
Ross Kenyon: One of the inevitable outcomes of larger-scale climate change is mass migration from place to place, and we had Bryan Caplan on the show a while back to talk about his book Open Borders. So if you want two-thirds of a billion more people living in America, I’m assuming you’re going to have to have more immigrants. Where do you think you might differ from Caplan’s approach?
Matthew Yglesias: Whoa. So, I mean, I agree with Bryan about a lot of things. He’s an economist. I think his economic analysis of immigration is really, really good. I think he quotes me in his book and I quote him in my book. So on one level, like, we’re very similar. On the other hand, like, Bryan is a hardcore anti-nationalist, so I think his vision of immigration is in part about sort of dissolving the American nation, and in a kind of important way. Whereas I see it the opposite way: that, like, I want to strengthen the American nation. I think that people moving here has been a source of national strength. I think that people are right to be skeptical of the idea of totally indiscriminately opening up the borders, but that, like, we should in fact be much more open to immigration, you know, both to make the country — I mean, primarily because, like, it will make America a better, stronger, greater, whatever, nation, right?
Paul Gambill: Isn’t the population leveling off a good thing in some people’s eyes? Like, break that down, what you were just saying. Like, why would it make us stronger, and how does having children relate to that too?
Matthew Yglesias: Sure. You know, I mean, I think the most basic way that it makes us a stronger country is market size, right? The United States for a long time — for about a hundred years, a little bit more — has been the world’s number one economy. And we’ve been the world’s number one economy for so long that we don’t think about that or what it means, right? But a lot of privileges come with that. Like, anyone anywhere who invents anything wants to bring it to the American market, right? It’s just a fact, because our market is so big. Secondarily, when our government wants to regulate things, you know, if we want to say, okay, everyone has to use high-efficiency dishwashers, companies will complain about that because they don’t want to do it, but if we tell them they have to do it, they will go do it, right?
New Zealand can’t just order people to change their whole manufacturing process because they want them to. Nobody cares about the New Zealand market, they’ll just walk away, right? So they’ve got a nice little country there with a lot of sheep, and the occasional movie shoots there, and a high standard of living, but in world terms they have to take or leave the world as they find it. And it’s been a world shaped by the United States, which is fairly benign as a world for sort of nice-guy developed countries to live in. China is less of a nice guy, and they are growing.
And you see, they have become already the world’s number one market for movie tickets. And so there was a great report on PEN America — that PEN America put out in August — about the consequences of this. And it means that right now Hollywood shapes their movies according to the demands of Chinese censors, right? The PRC movie censorship office serves the role of the EPA — like, we regulate dishwashers, they regulate the content of movies — and as they get bigger, they get more influence. So right now they tell Disney, you can’t have a Tibetan character in Doctor Strange, so they change it, so the Ancient One is no longer Tibetan, it’s played by Tilda Swinton and, you know, she has no determinate ethnicity.
But as this keeps going, right, as they get bigger, do they start telling Disney, well, ABC News can’t cover human rights in Tibet? Do they tell NBCUniversal that MSNBC, CNBC can’t cover these kinds of issues? And what do we say, right? These are profit-seeking companies. If that’s what they’ve got to do to get in the China market, like, that’s what they’ll do. You see it with American technology companies, right? So Apple has this big song and dance about user privacy, but there’s just a huge exception for phones sold in the China market. And if the China market gets bigger and bigger and China starts telling them, look, to get access to the China market you have to let the Chinese government snoop on everyone’s data — not just for Chinese phones, but for phones sold all throughout Asia — like, is Apple going to say no to that?
This is, I think, the basic concern that you’ve got to have. A lot of countries get by just fine with being small, but that’s because America has been the big country, right? And I think it’s in our interest — it’s in our interest to coordinate better with allies. I mean, there’s a lot of, like, Council on Foreign Relations type stuff you could think about here that we’re not doing. But basically, like, the fundamentals of national strength come down to population size times per capita GDP, right? So we all talk all the time about how to grow our GDP, you know, we have some ideas, but it’s hard. It’s hard to grow as fast as a poor country that’s catching up. But we can grow our population.
Paul Gambill: Matt, you kind of sound like a conservative here. What gives?
Matthew Yglesias: Very conservative. I’m super-duper-duper right-wing in this book, except that my two ideas are that we should expand the welfare state to take more care of parents and children, and then we should be more open to immigrants. So those are, like, super left-wing ideas.
Ross Kenyon: So, you know, everyone loves you.
Matthew Yglesias: I’m beloved by all. No, I’m — look, it’s been interesting. So, the reason that this is a good book to purchase and read, because that’s the point of all this, is that so much sh*t that you can buy today, it’s, like, it’s so tedious, you know? So, like, the bestseller list is like eleven books about how Donald Trump is a maniac, and I think one book about how liberals are destroying the country, and everybody knows what those books say. You know, like, you don’t need to read them, you don’t even need to have them on the shelf, like, everybody knows what you already think about Trump. It’s boring.
This is a book that, you know, I got some very good reviews in some right-wing publications, I got some bad reviews in some left-wing ones, I got vice versa. I got libertarians who like it, libertarians who hate it, social conservatives who like it, social conservatives who hate it. And it’s because it is actually an interesting book that is not just, like, a tedious recitation of the same talking points. So people of taste and distinction from all political persuasions love this book, and, you know, knuckle-dragging cretins from all around the spectrum think it’s bad.
Ross Kenyon: No, ruthless, ruthless. Yeah, most of the thinkers I come back to time and time again are those that — you know, any issue that breaks neatly into what I can imagine the right will say and what I imagine the left will say, I know is just going to be a boring, played-out thing we’ve been debating for decades, and I really don’t want to play in it. And I love that people like Wendell Berry or Dorothy Day, that I find very surprising — I’m just like, oh, I don’t always agree, but this is at least, you’re saying something new, and I respect that. And there’s definitely a lot of that in this book. So if you like that, I’m gonna pay you that compliment.
Paul Gambill: Matt, you’re also in that category of poking everyone in the eye and giving everyone a hug too.
Matthew Yglesias: Yeah. I mean, I just, like, you know, it’s a weird thing about being a, like, politics writer like I am, which is that agents come after you every once in a while, they’re like, oh, you should write a book. But so many of the books that I think people in my line of work write, right, just end up being boring, and our takes are better consumed in short form. So I wanted to write a book that was interesting, you know? So, like, I wasn’t writing one, and I wasn’t writing one, and then I came up with this idea that I actually thought was interesting. I have a lot of ideas that I think are true and correct, but, like, two hundred pages from me of, like, Donald Trump seems like he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or, wow, Republicans, they really like cutting taxes on rich people but also they’re kind of racist — it’s like, who cares? You know, those are tweets, those aren’t books.
I love Twitter, I love tweets, but, like, this is a book. It’s not that long of a book, but even a short book is, like, it’s kind of a lot of pages. So I wanted to make it interesting, you know, to put forward a proposition that I think is correct — that we should have a billion Americans — that people have a lot of questions about. And then I tried to, like, actually go through it and be like, here’s how we can change housing to accommodate them, here’s how we can change transportation policy to accommodate them, here’s what I think the eco-pessimists and dystopians get wrong, here’s what the cultural declinists get wrong, here’s what you ought to know about immigration economics, here’s what you don’t know about welfare state design. It’s like, you know, it’s chock full of facts and figures and information.
Brad Plumer, the climate writer at the Times, he paid me, I thought, a great compliment the other day. He said, like, separate from the argument, I learned a lot from this book — which is good, because, like, Brad’s a super smart guy, you know, he knows a lot, and it’s good to write a book that people can learn from.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. One of the things that I noticed in reading this book is how much it made me appreciate cities. So I’ve basically always been a city dweller — either suburban, exurban, actually in the heart of various cities — and all I can see now in spending time in cities is the squalor and the noise, and I find them to be very frustrating. And I’ve since moved a little bit farther out of the core of Seattle, so it’s more quiet and I’m more okay with living in the proximity of the city. But I spend so much time on this show, well, like, talking about — Wendell Berry comes up basically every episode — and this sort of idealized rural existence. And I need someone to bring us back to the center of that, because I think I’ve overdone it. So convince me that cities are actually a really important and good thing.
Matthew Yglesias: [unclear] I don’t know, I don’t want to be too provocative here. Okay, I won’t be mean about it. So, okay, you have cities, right? And in the cities we would all starve to death if not for the farmers in the countryside. You know, that’s just a fact. We need those countryside people. At the same time, the people living in the countryside would all be dirt-poor subsistence farmers if not for cities and urban life.
You know, you can have an idealized vision, that’s the countryside, but you can also look — I mean, you can look in a lot of Asian countries to this day and see people living in huts doing back-breaking labor ten hours a day in rice paddies, you know, growth-stunted because they have no protein. And that’s the natural state of rural life, right? We elevate above that. The reason that life in rural America, or rural Australia, Canada, France, whatever it might be, is actually pretty good is that we have, like, technologies and wealth that come out of cities, and ideas and things like that. And that’s just — cities, like, in world-historical terms, are agglomerations of human beings, right?
Now, in America we also have a lot of very specific things about central city municipalities versus suburbs that are near them, but obviously, like, the whole — like, the suburbs exist as part of an urban fabric, and it’s totally reasonable for, like, some people to live over here and some people to live over there. You know, you want to find a neighborhood that sort of suits you. But the point is that, like, the city has to exist for all of that to make sense.
Ross Kenyon: So I basically agree with you on that, and I’ve always lived in cities and I tend to like cities, and whenever I think about the idea of moving to a more rural area I get a little scared — basically scared of missing out on different cultural things and being close to the amenities that I like. But one of the frustrations I have living in the city is how cities are governed. And, you know, before we started recording this, you were starting to share an opinion about, like, how the Los Angeles metro system is poorly run. And here in Seattle we’ve committed to an over fifty billion dollar light rail system that won’t even be fully operational until, like, almost the year 2040. And then meanwhile, compared to China, your foil in this book, who are able to build mass transit systems in, like, a week and a half. What are we doing wrong? How do we improve that? What are the mechanics of making cities work better for their residents?
Matthew Yglesias: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot that we are doing wrong. I mean, the point I was making, you know, when we were talking before, is that, like, I think progressive-minded people are aware that big cities in America are not, like, perfectly governed. Like, if you just kind of ask them, right, you’d be like, how’s it going in Los Angeles, is everything perfect? They’d be like, no, in fact there are significant problems. And listen, not to knock it, but just, like, every city is like that. And yet you can’t say, oh well, the problem here is Republicans, right? It’s like, we are actually struggling to govern ourselves and achieve what it is we want to achieve.
You know, I think a lot of that comes down fundamentally to land use questions, right? So, like, the LA Metro — I’m quite familiar with the saga on this, and it’s really sad. Like, they have spent an incredible amount of money building a subway system in Los Angeles. And, you know, of course it’s not that big of a subway system relative to the size of the city, it’s totally understandable that it hasn’t been enough investment to transform LA into, like, a true mass transit city, but it’s much more extensive a transit system than, like, a small European city would have, but it has almost no ridership. Because LA, for starters, they run trains very infrequently, and the trains don’t run frequently, they say, because they can’t afford to run them frequently, but that’s because fare collection is so low, because the ridership is so low. And then the ridership is so low in part because they didn’t change any of the land use. They didn’t say, okay, you can build tall apartment buildings now near these train stations.
And, you know, Seattle I don’t know as well, but I was there last year and I was taking whatever the train is in from the airport, and, you know, you’re sort of cruising south of downtown and into what looked like, you know, reasonably built-up areas, but you’ll be right there by a station and it’s, like, parking lots, you know, or one-story, you know, it’s kind of like strip-mall-style retail, and it’s not zoned to say, okay, you know, you’re within a quarter-mile walk from this light rail station, you could just put up, like, a big-*ss tower. And then you go into, like, really, really the center of the city, and there is, like, some part of town where they have allowed people to put up big-*ss towers and there’s a bunch of cranes there. And so everyone in Seattle is like, oh my God, there’s so much development here — and there is, in fact, more development in Seattle than there is in San Francisco, where there’s, like, basically none. But still, a majority of the land, not in the Seattle metro area but in the city of Seattle itself, is zoned for single-family detached houses.
And, you know, it’s fine, people like single-family detached houses, but when you make it illegal to build denser stuff, you get huge housing affordability problems, you get — you don’t have the density to support transit ridership. And so you have everybody kind of kicking it around and it’s like, well, I want somebody else to take the light rail, you know, but not me, I want to keep driving my car and I want parking everywhere. But that’s not how cities work. Like, if you look at cities, you know, whether it’s Paris or Berlin or Hong Kong or Singapore or New York, right, that, like, have substantial transit ridership, they have made themselves too dense for it to be convenient to drive and park your car somewhere.
Ross Kenyon: Where do you fall on buses versus trains? Because, like, I used to have to commute to downtown Seattle, and the bus route that I took came every fifteen to thirty minutes, and then going home was a total nightmare, and I just always kept finding myself thinking, like, if we would just reroute some of the fifty billion dollars that we put into this train system that won’t even be usable for twenty years into just more buses with more frequent service, would that improve it? Would ridership go up? What does the research say on that? What’s better here?
Matthew Yglesias: So, you know, it’s not that, like, buses are good and trains are bad or something. I do think that what’s true is that when you have a city at the scale of Seattle, say, probably the best thing to do is to look at your bus network and try to make it better, right? That the sort of quality of the bus service is a limiting factor on ridership. Then investing in rail, I think, is really, really worthwhile, but the reason to do it would be to facilitate very dense development near the rail stops. And I guess, like, that’s what I’m saying about LA, right? They kind of wanted to, like, take LA as it exists and then come up with, spend a lot of money — like, the voters of LA were willing to truly open their wallets to this goal — but what they wanted to do was get somebody else to ride the Metro, so that their life could be exactly the same with less traffic in it. And it doesn’t work like that, right?
Like, the LA Metro is this great achievement, you know, like, they spent a lot of money on it, it’s a lot of tunnels, it does in fact work. But the reason to do something like that would be to rezone to have big apartment buildings near the train stations, and then a lot of people would ride the train, but it would be a different kind of city after that, right? But it would be a better city after that, and that’s what people should do. Like, if they want to have, like, green growth and, you know, Green New Deal and ba-ba-ba-ba, like, the whole point of the New Deal was for things to be different after it was done than they were previously. A lot of progressive thought, it feels like people want progress without change.
Paul Gambill: Hmm. Yeah, it sounds like you’re saying that, like, in LA the train system, that’s the end in and of itself, but you’re suggesting that, like, rail investment should be a means to an end, which is increasing density so that more people can live and work affordably in cities.
Matthew Yglesias: Okay, yes, exactly. You know, or there are some places in America that are so dense — yeah, I’m sorry — you have bus routes that have such heavy ridership, in a few places, there’s, like, a couple routes in New York that are like this, maybe one in San Francisco, maybe one here in Washington, DC, where I live, that just upgrading them to rail would be justified in terms of the number of people who would do it.
But in the typical American city, you know, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Dallas, you’re looking at big cities, there’s, like, a lot of demand to live in them, and the purpose of building a rail network should be to reshape the urban form so you can achieve a higher level of, you know, urban density, or — I don’t know what the right verb is, but it’s like people would live near the train stations, you know? Like, that’s what trains are for. The thing that they are good at is that the geometry of rail lines is that they move human beings more efficiently than roads do. But if you don’t want that outcome, then there’s no point. I mean, I think trains look nice, as do a lot of people, but, like, that’s not a good reason to build them.
Paul Gambill: I used to live in LA and take the trains at times — the red line off of Vermont — and I had to go downtown, I would do that, or go into the Valley. It was fine and it worked. Okay. I’ve heard LA described as the United States’ first postmodern city, without just a clear center, where there are various different types of centers depending on where you would want to go. It wasn’t like downtown LA was where all commercial activity was concentrated — in fact, probably quite the opposite. So how do you build an environment like that? Does that model really make sense for it in the same kinds of ways it might with Manhattan?
Matthew Yglesias: Well, so, I mean, I think it does, right? So you take LA, right, and if you just posit massive upzoning of all of the Metro stations, right, then that starts to create a thing where more people are living near those stations, sometimes because they want to ride the train, but honestly maybe they have no desire to ride the train, it’s just that houses are really expensive everywhere in California. So if you build giant apartment buildings, like, anywhere in Los Angeles, some people will live in them.
So now all of a sudden you have a lot of people and they’re living near Metro stations, and now companies are thinking about where to locate office buildings, and commute patterns matter, right? But the Metro network converges on downtown Los Angeles, just like things do in classic cities. So once you have a bunch of people who are living near Metro stations, then if you put your office downtown, that becomes a convenient way for a lot of people to get to you, whereas if you have it in, you know, wherever else, Culver City, it’s maybe not as good. So it becomes a reason to have a sort of more centralized kind of thing.
You know, I would also say that Americans sometimes think that, like, Los Angeles and New York are the only cities in the world, so if New York is very, like, centralized and then LA isn’t, it’s like, well, LA is super weird. But there’s a lot of multi-centered cities in the world, right? Paris doesn’t have a hyper-focused downtown. Berlin has sort of several distinct city centers because of the unique history that it’s had over the years. So it’s fairly normal for cities to be a little bit less — like, Manhattan is an island, like, New York is actually a little bit the weird city more than LA is. But LA is, you know, it’s built around freeways, but that’s because, like, they built these freeways and then they built the city around it. Now they’ve built all these rail lines and you have to let the city build around them.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. Okay. I’m gonna take a little bit of a different direction here. Matt, we listened to your podcast with Tyler Cowen — if you’re listening and you haven’t heard Conversations with Tyler, often quite a good way to spend your time listening to a podcast, it’s a good show — but you had an interesting comment about how, centralizing in order to decentralize. So I think I speak for Paul and I here, I think we both like subsidiarity. We want institutions to be as small and as local as it actually makes sense to, with the scale. Obviously, if it just doesn’t make sense for something to be small scale and it needs to be larger in order to function properly, I’m not ideological about it — well, I try not to be, at least. But do you think a more populous country would make federalism, in this sort of fifty different states experimenting, work better, and actually make that a more functional way to govern?
Matthew Yglesias: Well, I think the book does not get into this, and —
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think you say it’s a whole separate book or something like that.
Matthew Yglesias: Details. Like, people should ask themselves why American federalism is so crappy, because it’s, like, a good idea, right? I think you discuss a lot of different problems and people will reach the conclusion that federalism might be useful here. And federalism really should be useful, right? But if you look at it empirically, what happens is that the dominant player in state politics is the state legislature — even more so, you know, Congress is more powerful than the presidency, but state politics are even more tilted to the legislature. That’s in part because they don’t have the national security arena, which is a huge part of the president’s job. It’s in part because the executive branch tends to be disaggregated, so you’ll have a separately elected attorney general, an insurance commissioner, controller or treasurer, other things like that. So these hyper-empowered legislators —
And then you look at state legislative elections and you see that people’s voting behavior is an almost pure function of their approval of the president of the United States. You know what I mean? So, like, people vote Republican for state legislature in Louisiana because they like Donald Trump, and that has obviously nothing to do with how good a job the legislature is doing of making policy for Louisiana. And people, for governor, show a lot more creativity. So Louisiana and Kentucky have Democratic governors, Massachusetts and Maryland have Republican governors, and that’s because of specific things that were happening in the states. But the governors don’t actually have a lot of authority in those states, the legislators do, and they’re often very gerrymandered on top of that. So I think that’s all pretty bad, right?
And if we want to have a real politics of federalism, we need to have real state politics. And that means some mix of empowering the governor more relative to other officials, because you have real electoral competition there, and it means trying to differentiate the political party system. Like in Canada, you can have totally separate parties in your provinces than you have in national federal politics, so that people say, look, in my Quebec election I vote based on Quebec issues, and then in my Canada election I vote based on Canada issues. And we don’t have any of that in America, and it makes federalism very, very weak as a sort of, like, effective strategy for addressing governance.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I see your point there. One of my, like, bugaboos is, I’m just not a fan of the Seventeenth Amendment and the idea of changing the way the senators are elected to be popularly voted upon rather than by the state legislatures. But it sounds like you’re arguing against putting more power in the hands of the legislators. But I guess just in general, you know, we’ve got this, like, major partisan, increasingly partisan times that are happening, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. So we basically have a federal government that doesn’t work well at all, and if we triple the country’s population, is that going to make things better or worse? Like, how do we make the government more responsive to that many people?
Matthew Yglesias: Well, so, I put the cart and the horse the other way around. My claim is that our politics has become dysfunctional because in the post-Cold War environment we have stopped really having a politics that’s about improving America, and we’ve instead had this politics that’s about pitting Americans against each other and fighting with each other, right? And it’s not that having a larger population will fix that problem, it’s that raising our gaze away from picking fights with each other and toward thinking about America’s role in the world, and how we can be the dominant great power of the next century and the century after that, will naturally create a more constructive politics.
Because, you know, so, like, one thing in the book is I’m talking about how we should do more, you know, to support people with, like, day care subsidies, and, you know, I give my view of what’s the right way to do that. But I could totally imagine a conservative person putting more weight on deregulation as a solution. A left-wing person might say — I say that we should give some support to stay-at-home parents; a left-wing person might disagree with that, a cultural conservative might think it’s absolutely essential. This is, like, a thing you can disagree about in politics, but the premise of that disagreement would be that we agree that we should be doing something to financially support childrearing, right?
Ross Kenyon: Right, right.
Matthew Yglesias: And then we’re having a conversation about how do we do that. And then we can have — I do, if you guys know the book, great classic business book Getting to Yes, you know, about how to have constructive negotiations. Right now it’s like, if we want to reach a solution, that I think we can — I don’t think the values that divide Americans are this, like, unbridgeable void, but they’re significant — and mostly the way our politics is set up, folks just don’t want to bridge the divide, right? They want to find reasons to break up and then say, ah, f*ck you. And so, like, we can’t solve any problems that way, and we’re not going to. And if you’re satisfied with the country just kind of going down the tubes, you know, that’s fine, but it seems bad to me.
Paul Gambill: We had the Cold War, and that was the unifying thing. It was, like, what fueled the space race and other types of projections of American cultural values around the world, and we’ve basically lost it. This is, like, the Fukuyama, like, end of history kind of thing. Like, we haven’t really had anything like that to unify us since 1990 or so. And it sounds like your argument is, well, this is a thing that we can all aspire to, and so if we can agree on the ends, then we can start debating the means, which is where actual policy discussions take place.
Matthew Yglesias: Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. And if you read Fukuyama’s book, which people sometimes dunk on, right, if you’ve read his last chapter, it’s actually quite pessimistic. Like, he’s not saying this is gonna be great, he’s actually predicting that we’re going to have very divisive politics dominated by demagogues and nonsense, which I think is more or less what happened. And as everybody says, like, history is not, in fact, over. We have a bunch of big challenges.
And, you know, something that I think is interesting about the Cold War is it wasn’t just, well, okay, we did the space program to stick it to the Soviets, but that at that time you would not have had an advocate of the free enterprise system stand up and say, well, you know what, if millions of people have stagnating wages for a generation and can’t get health insurance and their children are living in poverty, that’s just the market for you, right? Because that would sound like a pitch for communism, right? People believed it, people who believed in capitalism wanted to make the system work, right? They undertook an obligation to not just say that, like, in theory this would be better, but that, like, actually it had to be better, right? We accepted that challenge.
And we sort of don’t have that now, right? There’s no sense that America needs to live up to its values or that America needs to deliver for its people. And I think that that moment of innocence is sort of slipping away, and it’s time to start thinking about what do we plan to do in this world.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I’m fairly sympathetic, though, to the idea that one billion Americans could be a similar rallying call that we can all unify around, like the space race. Yes, I mean, it just seems like, we let more people in and we have more children — that’s not, like, defeat communism, go to the moon, plant an American flag. It seems to be, be number one forever.
Matthew Yglesias: Be number one forever — there we go.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah, that’s, that’s controversial in its own way, but if I’m going to live in a country, I probably would want it to be the world leader. I don’t know, I’m not nearly as embarrassed about that as I should be. But you’re saying —
Matthew Yglesias: I’m saying you should own it. It’s like, I think one of the things in American politics today is, like, nobody is, like, ah, who cares, number one, number two. Everybody says — everyone’s speeches are like, this is the greatest country on Earth, but then you look at these IMF projections and it’s like, well, in purchasing power parity terms we’re already number two, in exchange rate terms we’re still number one, but everyone thinks China’s exchange rate is fake. So maybe we’ll still be number one for, like, five or six more years. And so, like, you could say Joe Biden’s platform: he is going to be, like, the last president for whom America was the number one economy in the world. That sounds really bad, actually, when you state it that way. So what are we going to do about it, right? Like I say, grow the population.
Paul Gambill: I was going to say, like, I mean, when I visit, like, other Westernized countries that have, like, you know, roughly similar cultural values to what we have here in the US, and if I go to a store or a grocery store, or I turn on the TV or whatever, everything that I’m seeing are cultural exports from the United States. And I can imagine being a citizen of one of those countries and just being, like, a little bit annoyed and jealous and envious that everything, like, runs through America.
Ross Kenyon: You have no idea how many times people will say, like, oh, Ross from Friends, and I’m like, I’m not even, like, some random country I’ve been to all the time.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, right. So that to me seems like a good reason. Like, I mean, I agree with Matt’s objective here. I like being in the country that is the cultural exporter, because that means that when I participate in the culture, I’m participating in the thing that ultimately affects much more around the world than if I were just a Kiwi in New Zealand and my only export is Flight of the Conchords.
Matthew Yglesias: Yeah, and What We Do in the Shadows, and Lord of the Rings. Right. But right now, look, I — it’s something that everybody knows, right? If you grew up in New Zealand and you’re smart and you’re ambitious and, you know, you do really well in high school and whatever, and you want to, like, make it in the world, you know, you’ve got to end up moving to London or New York or San Francisco or something like that. Is that going to happen in Auckland, right? And that’s an important part of the American identity, I think, that, like, we are this great hub of stuff, right? Cultural stuff, technical innovation. We’ve got all kinds of problems, obviously, everyone knows all about that, but we also have the opportunity for a level of greatness that does not exist elsewhere, right?
And, like, maybe closer to the main theme of you guys’ show, right, it’s like, I have no idea where the person who invents an amazing way to, like, suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will be born. Like, could be anywhere. But I have really strong odds that that company that does that stuff will be an American company. You know, like, that person is going to come — now, maybe not, right, you could imagine it China, Japan, Germany, there’s, like, a few other plausible contenders, but they’re also pretty big countries in the scheme of things. And, like, it could totally be a person from Iceland, or, you know, Honduras, or God knows where, but they are going to migrate to a big country with big cities, a big base of investors and technically skilled people and customers, and a government that can think in terms of big projects, because just, like, that’s how the state of the art moves forward.
And nothing against New Zealand, or Portugal, or the Czech Republic — there’s lots of nice little countries out there, you know, and every once in a while they give us something like Legos out of Denmark, but, like, the big stuff gets done by the big countries, and that’s, like, deep in America’s DNA and fiber, and I don’t think we should, like, reject that and, like, shrink ourselves down. I think we should embrace it.
Ross Kenyon: One of the long-running debates on the show, although we’ve mostly had people who think the answer is yes, and I believe you will think this as well: people listening should have kids, right? If they’re like, I don’t know, because of the climate — you’re saying just have kids, your kid might solve climate change.
Matthew Yglesias: Yeah, I mean, there’s that, and there’s — I mean, look, if you don’t want to have kids, don’t have kids, right? And if you want to come up with a high-minded reason for it, you can say climate change is the reason. I mean, that’s fine. I just, like — I mean, I was a philosophy major in college and I don’t really go deep into this population ethics stuff, but it’s like everybody understands that, like, Thanos is the villain in the Avengers movies.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know that everyone does, but yes.
Matthew Yglesias: Okay, well, I mean, I mean, who knows? I got some weird callers from, like, Marin County, and that really made me wonder. But, like, just not having there be people is not a solution to problems. Like, it’s a — you’re just, like, you’re looking through the telescope in the wrong direction. It’s like, yeah, the Tacitus, the Romans, what, created a wasteland and call it peace. Like, there’s no problem if there’s no humans, but yeah.
It’s like, yeah, okay. I, like, I mean, if you don’t want to have children, you don’t want to have children, like, that’s fine. I have one kid, I’m very happy with that. I feel like two would be very stressful. But, like, I’m not going to tell you that I did that for other people, you know, it just makes my life easier to have a small family. This one viewpoint that is like, well, people are the solution because, you know, like, who might invent, like, the next great — I don’t know, a solar panel that works at night or something. But it’s just more than that. It’s not like people are the topic of the discussion, so to just say, like, well, if we didn’t have any people then we wouldn’t have the problem — like, that’s weird, that’s neither here nor there.
And, you know, like, some day one of these, like, nutty spree killers who pop up every once in a while and do something horrifying will write in their manifesto that, like, they’re really worried about climate change, and then conservatives are going to all go dunk on the left about it. That’s going to be sh*tty and unfair. But, but, like, it’s sh*tty and unfair because nobody actually thinks that just, like, extirpating humanity is a fix, quote-unquote, to environmental problems. And so it’s been a perverse — you know, I have gotten some reviews by people on the left who are like, oh man, like, this is really terrible on climate grounds, but none of the people on the left who say that seemed to actually disagree with me that we should have a generous immigration policy, or that we should spend money on preschool, or that we should have paid parental leave. So it’s a little like, where’s the beef here?
Like, there was this old-school, like, real dystopian thread in the environmental movement where they were, like, all tied in with population control people and anti-immigration people, but they decided, like, twenty or thirty years ago that that was racist and bad and wrong, and they’re right. But then, like, they need to own that, and you can’t just, like, opportunistically invoke climate change.
Ross Kenyon: So we had your colleague David Roberts on once upon a time, and I don’t think he would mind me saying this — I will think about it before and edit it if I need to — but I got a lot of nasty notes about it because we tried so hard to be like, David, surely, surely there’s something worth saving, right-of-center, this conservative idea has some value. There are things happening with Republicans and climate, there are things to hope for. He was very nice, but gave very little ground on that. So, Matt, is there anything you’d like to add as an addendum to David’s visit?
Matthew Yglesias: So look, I mean, on one level I think I agree with his perspective, which is that the institutional Republican party is not just sitting there waiting for a more reasonable climate proposal and then they’ll say, hey, yeah, like, let’s do a bipartisan climate bill. Like, the reason they don’t want to do that is more fundamental. That being said, like, I think, I mean, again, I look at Los Angeles, I look at New York City, you know, like, you look at places where Republicans are not a factor, and you ask yourself, like, are these guys doing what it really takes to address climate change? And they’re not, you know, they’re tied up in NIMBYism and, like, degrowth stuff, and not really contributing in a meaningful way. And it just goes to show that, like, the problem is bigger and more complex than the Republicans are bad, right?
What I think is true is that, so, say in 2016 Republicans had lost the election and lost control of the Senate, and Democrats had filled Scalia’s seat with Merrick Garland, and then Kennedy had gotten bored, and, you know, say, like, the past four years had gone really differently, that might have made Republican party elites really sad about losing, and they would have said, man, we should stop losing elections, and it seems like our climate denialism is really unpopular, so maybe we should come to the table with some climate solutions. And there’s plenty of right-of-center people who have reasonable climate solution ideas, just, like, waiting there for Republicans to say they want them, right? They don’t want them, is the problem. And so if you beat them badly and make them sad, they might go use those solutions, you know, just like anybody else, right?
So it’s like when Democrats lost enough elections in a row, they decided they were tired of everybody thinking they had no ideas on crime, and so they came up with some ideas, right? Like, if Republicans lose, they’ll come up with ideas on the environment. There’s smart people, they’re not evil people even, it’s just that, like, right now they think their current posture is a winning strategy. You know, so I say climate change, they say, oh, you want to ban hamburgers. So, I don’t know, like, that’s dumb, that’s a juvenile approach to politics, but that’s where we’re at right now. But the solution isn’t that there’s going to be some utopia, like, conservative politics, right, is basically you have the interests of businessmen and you have the sort of socio-cultural majority saying it likes its way of doing things, and that is the most natural form of politics in the world, right?
Like, everywhere on the planet there is conservative politics of that. What exactly its content is changes all the time. So it’s like conservatism will always be with us, and if you have solutions — like in Germany, they have some good climate policies because the conservative party wanted to do them, and that’s how things happen. It’s like, leftists, it’s like, you know, we say things and we have ideas and we might win elections sometimes, but, like, things happen because conservatives get on board.
Paul Gambill: No, I actually agree with that. I think it is fair to say that in general politicians are opportunistic, they seek out power above all else, and that if there were a complete and total drubbing of the Republican party in 2016, I do think that there is potentially some truth to the idea that maybe they would start adopting positions that were more popular among the electorate that does not currently support Republicans.
Matthew Yglesias: I think that’s, I think that’s fair and legitimate.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t, I don’t have much to disagree with there. I will also second that there are lots of people who are trying to engage with conservatives and Republicans on issues of climate change. I mean, Benji Backer has been on the show multiple times now talking about that, and there’s Bob Inglis as well. There are plenty of groups like that. So I think it’s just a matter of time before eventually these things become so widespread. I mean, like, culturally — and I thought you distinguished between these things pretty well earlier, Matt — that culturally, like, climate change is an issue that everyone is aware of, more and more people are in support of doing something about, and it’s just politics that is lagging behind. And there’s no way that that doesn’t catch up. So I think we can be optimistic about that for the future. It’s just a matter of, how do we make that happen as quickly as possible.
Matthew Yglesias: Yeah. And, I mean, the problem with climate change, unfortunately, is that the timeline on which really bad things start happening is just pretty aggressive, you know? I mean, so, you know, so it’s like Obama liked to quote Martin Luther King about how the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice, right? And so, you know, in the 1880s, like, Reconstruction is completely undone, and then it takes eighty years after that to get to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And of course that’s not, like, the end of racism or racial problems, but it’s a huge step forward. But that eighty-year timeline, that’s awful, you know, for the people who lived under Jim Crow for two and three generations.
And the good news is that we can now, like, big-picture it and say, well, we’ll look back from the year 2374 and say, maybe that wasn’t so long. But if, you know, irreparable harms are already underway — so it’s, like, natural for activists to just be impatient, and I never want to tell anyone to, like, hey, calm down, you know, the problem’s not serious. At the same time, like, the political process is what it is. And if, say, 2016 — because it seems like three presidential election losses in a row is kind of like a magic number, at which point a political party starts seriously rethinking things. But it’s not like, you know, I don’t, like — I’m optimistic. It’s not like no right-of-center people have good ideas on climate change, or that it’s impossible to imagine a conservative movement that embraces meaningful climate action. I just don’t think it’s going to happen, like, just for no reason, or because I write, like, a really good take about bipartisan solutions.
It’s like, there has to be an electoral event that makes the people who are leaders in that movement say, you know, the, like, gun nuts and the anti-abortion fanatics and, like, they need to say, man, I don’t want to lose elections over this, like, right, coal-mining nonsense. Like, who cares? And that’s how coalition politics works, right? Like, people get thrown under the bus. The people who didn’t want to see gay couples get married, like, who knows what happened to them, right? Like, right, Republicans put them in the deep freezer someplace because it became an embarrassing issue.
It’s sort of counterintuitive to think, but, like, I mean, if you are a conservative or Republican and you don’t like the Green New Deal, then you have to engage on the issue, because if you’re not even participating in that conversation, then there’s no bulwark against that and it’s just going to be continued, like, one-sided policy discussion, right? I mean, and I would love, love to see a more pro-growth, technology-focused, but serious — not like, oh well, solve it with technology so we don’t need to do this regulation, but like, here’s my three hundred billion, huge moonshot techno-utopia, like, do something. You know, like, something big, and then we can have a debate about that. But right now it’s like, well, you have a couple big ideas rolling through environmental circles, and then you’ve got, you know, I don’t know what, you know, you’ve got, like, let’s pretend that windmills are going to make birds extinct, and, you know, that’s, that’s dumb. There’s a lot of dumb stuff in play.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, government is really good at some things and it’s really bad at doing other things, and I think we would all benefit if there were more diversified voices discussing, like, how to actually achieve these goals. Like, I would so much rather have the government spend its resources investing in research and development of technologies and grant programs for things like converting to regenerative agriculture or whatever. I would rather not see the government create, like, a make-work program that’s intended to solve, like, some social problem at the same time as currying environmentalism. And that’s just, like, not a discussion that anyone is open to having right now, but it sounds like you are, and I wish more people were like that.
Matthew Yglesias: So, electoral politics, right, is zero-sum. Like, only one person can be president, only one person can win that seat. But policy is positive-sum. So, you know what I mean? Like, if you have a serious conversation where one person says my top priority is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and somebody else says my top priority is to have a vibrant farm economy, like, there are ways to reconcile those two things if people state their top priorities and then they want to reconcile them.
And that’s true for, like, any two priorities, right? It’s like, we human beings are smart and we can make win-win deals on pretty much any topic, but you have to want to make a deal, right? You have to accept the premise that we should be doing something on the climate front, rather than using the issue opportunistically to win votes. And we just haven’t been there, you know what I mean? Like, we haven’t been in a place where elected officials — I mean, on climate, elected officials on the right in particular have not wanted to reach a deal. They’ve just construed that a deal on a climate bill would be a win for the left.
Ross Kenyon: Right. Well, a lot of fun. Thanks for coming out and hanging with us, Matt.
Matthew Yglesias: Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: And yeah, one last question, I’ll make it a short one though: what are the odds that we get to one billion Americans this century?
Matthew Yglesias: I don’t know. The odds are against it, but I don’t think it’s wildly implausible. We would need to achieve something like Canada’s population growth rate. So, you know, if enough people buy the book, [unclear] are going to be like, hey, I guess we want a billion Americans, I guess I should read it, you know? And then we’ll get it done. So it’s really on you, the podcast-listening audience, to decide whether or not it happens. I can’t predict my own sales.
Ross Kenyon: You are a professional. That was so skillfully executed. Where should someone buy this if they want to support what you’re up to?
Matthew Yglesias: Well, I mean, it depends. You know, if you are a sort of neo-pastoralist, you should buy it at your local independent bookstore. You can go to Bookshop.com and order it from them, and that’s great, we love independent bookstores in the book game. On the other hand, you know, if you are a techno-modernist, you might think an e-book is a lot more environmentally friendly, and we’re available in the Google Play Store, Amazon Kindle, whatever Apple’s bookstore is called — I think just Apple Books. So it’s everywhere. Also audiobook, if you just love my voice. So, watch, I actually read the audiobook script, so you can hear me ramble even more, on Audible and other platforms. So there’s really a lot of great ways to buy this book. There’s no wrong way to do it.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, links, links in the show notes. Go ahead, Paul, what’s that?
Paul Gambill: So I can vouch for the audiobook. I listened to it in one go while I was driving home from California a couple weeks ago. So there you go.
Matthew Yglesias: Yeah, it’s a good listen. There’s also a factual error about the population of Detroit in the text, which is corrected in the audiobook.
Ross Kenyon: So, excellent, real-time updates. You can get less fake news about the population of Detroit by consuming audio. Great, great. Well, thanks again, Matt.
Paul Gambill: Thank you, Matt.
Matthew Yglesias: Thank you. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being on this one. If you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, or Apple Podcasts as it is these days. The reviewing really helps, helps get this content out to more people. Thanks so much for listening. Tell your friends, and we appreciate it.
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