Matt Yglesias: recommendation

Transcript context

…Don’t those governance issues mean we can’t get to a billion because, as we move toward a billion, the new arrivals — a lot of them will want to go to New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and they’ll wreck those places, and then we’ll stop. Is that not the equilibrium? Or is the equilibrium somehow New York annexes Connecticut, and a lot of it starts operating more like Northern Virginia, and it works pretty well, and it’s all one big happy ending? Or do we stop? Well, that’s interesting. I don’t know that it’s clearly true that population growth would pour into a place like New York. Some people would, but we have seen incredibly dynamic growth in our Sun Belt metro areas, which are unfashionable in various ways, but people are doing very well for themselves in Atlanta and Dallas and Houston and the smaller ones, Nashville, San Antonio, where I spend a lot of time for family reasons. They’ve become incredibly international just because America is a good place to live. Chicago, which has a lot of those New Yorky qualities but is much cheaper, has been losing people, which is its own governance-type problems. But I feel like there’s plenty of space for folks. The interesting political constraint, obviously, is on immigration, right? I remember you wrote some time ago — I think in response to Bryan Caplan — that it’s look, if you care about immigration and you care about people’s ability to move, let’s maybe chill with the open-borders talk because you’re going to hit a hard political constraint, and the country’s going to lock down. We’ve seen something like that dynamic in the United States. We’ve seen it in a lot of countries, so managing people’s level of tolerance for social and demographic change, particularly with foreigners coming in, is an important political concept. That’s where you need — I don’t know what you would call it — wise political leadership and not just strident, analytically correct, abstract people. Let’s talk about fertility for a bit. Is there a danger that the whole world or most of the world becomes like Japan, where the population just keeps on shrinking, and the world becomes a depopulated place? Is that on the horizon if we don’t do what you’re saying?…

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