Matt Yglesias: evaluation

Transcript context

…I get that too. Yeah. I’m not a super Zionist person, but I’m Jewish secular. I have some critiques of Israeli policy, but fundamentally, to me, the idea of there being a Jewish state is not crazy, just like there’s a Danish state and there’s a Finnish state. You got to do things there, and it wouldn’t be that if you had a flood of immigration. Similarly, economically, Denmark’s nice. It’s a nice place. If Danish people like it that way, I think that’s fine. Good for them. America is a big diverse country whose strength, I think, has always had a lot to do with scale. It makes a lot of sense for us to see some positive lessons learned from Sweden in terms of ways you can be more humane and still be dynamic. We have big startups, things like that here. I think the idea of trying to turn the United States into a giant Denmark, where people are reasonably affluent, but there’s no really big-deal things happening here, like some guy who makes windmills. To me, that doesn’t make sense. The United States is a big place. It’s been a big place for a long time. It’s a diverse place. It’s a place that cares about its power on the national scale. To your inequality point, that means it’s going to be a relatively unequal place compared to some other kinds of countries. In your book, you only cover the United States, but a lot of your arguments are pretty general, and I mean that in a good way. So why not, say, a billion people for the European Union? You mentioned that America has a tradition of being diverse, but at some point, it didn’t have that tradition. Do you think that countries or regions that don’t have the tradition of being diverse can start being diverse, and the EU, which is actually now pretty diverse, could take in a billion people?…

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