The case for one billion Americans, & more (Matt Yglesias)

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2021

⏱️ 101 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matt Yglesias talks about One Billion Americans, his book arguing that it’s in the United States’ national interest to dramatically boost its population, by expanding immigration and having more babies.

Matt and Julia also discuss arguments for and against the “YIMBY” movement, which pushes for building more housing; what they’ve both learned from reflecting on their misguided support for the Iraq War in 2003; and why (and how) Matt is trying to be more of a rationalist.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of Rationally Speaking is brought to you by Givewell, the nonprofit that searches for evidence-based charities where your donation can do the most good.
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1:10.7	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
1:17.2	I'm your host, Julia Galef, and my guest for this episode is someone who I know many of you have
1:22.1	been wanting me to get on the show for a while. Matt Iglesias, co-founder of vox.com, author of several books, including most
1:28.6	recently One Billion Americans, The Case for Thinking Bigger. And Matt is now publishing an excellent
1:34.6	blog and newsletter at slowboring.com. He describes it as being a site for people who are
1:40.7	interested in finding out what's actually true about American politics and
1:44.5	public policy, not just what flatters your biases. And I can endorse that description. I almost
1:50.6	never subscribe to anything, but slow boring is one of the few exceptions that I make. So Matt and I
1:58.0	cover roughly three topics in this conversation. First, Matt's most recent book, One Billion Americans, in which he argues that it's in the national interest of the U.S. to dramatically ramp up our population growth by allowing more immigration and by having more babies. Second, the Yimbi movement, which argues that we should be building a lot more housing, especially in
2:18.1	expensive cities, which is something that Matt has also written extensively about. And I try to
2:23.9	throw some of my best Yimbi critiques at him. And then third is a topic that might sound a little
2:29.3	more out of left field, the Iraq War. So the impetus for this was that I've been recently trying to figure out
	...

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