Matthew YglesiasCritiques

Now, I have only read the sample which seems to copy paste half of the text of the plot description.

One thing that is a recurrent theme in the book is that it is quite obvious the author has never actually been to China. I went mainly to Shanghai and Nanjing around 2 years ago and the country is very, very different from most of the US. I have never been to NYC, but Philly has around 2/3 of the population density of NYC and still felt reasonably empty in the pedestrian friendly downtown area. Curiously Santiago de Chile has 3 times Philly's population density but I didn't feel it to be so crammed outside of riding the subway at rush hour. Hip neighborhoods like Baquedano do fill up on Fridays but it isn't like... that full all day. If you walk in that area at 9 am on a weekday, chances are there will only be another 5 people you will see.

Guadalajara Mexico has twice the density of NYC and even their downtown doesn't cram up with people fighting for 1 centimeter of living space. Mexico City is apparently similarly congested as GDL, and chances are the stats is skewed because they might be counting the semi rural villages of Tlalpan and the expansive unpopulated marshes of Texcoco which will skew the results. If you remove those areas and focus on the 6 million people living in the densely packed suburbs of Ecatepec, Chimalhuacan, Nezahualcoyotl, Naucalpan, Tlalnepantla, and Atizapan, Mexico City's density will likely be closer to 35,000 people per square mile instead of around 28,000 vs NYCs approx 27,000. And yes, Mexico City is packed, go ride the subway or try to hitch a spot in the Metrobus on a weekday at 7:30 am and people are literally everywhere!

Shanghai's downtown area is 17 million and yes, downtown areas with malls are so infested with people everywhere it is literally dizzying. You can barely even enjoy yourself being flooded with so many people. But even then, pick a nice afternoon stroll near the Bund and you might only spot 2 or 3 people walking around. The city can get epicly crowded, but it isn't like it is jam packed like a rock concert 24/7 either.

And after this brief detour, I return to my statement the author writes wonders about tripling the US population without showing much proof he has actually lived in one of the world's top 50 most densely inhabited megacities. I seriously doubt he would believe overpopulation has made cities like Lagos or Kinshasa the top of everyone's bucket list.

So, how does cities like Mexico City, Tokyo and Shanghai pack so many people? Most people lived crammed up in teeny tiny condos arguably just 1/5 of the size of the condo Rachel inhabits in the Friends show. Japanese people make every centimeter count and the living room is also the kitchen and bedroom. Families of 4 might live crammed up like this and feel it is perfectly normal. I bet most urban Chinese tourists feel shocked when they visit their first mega McMansion in suburban Texas with 6 bedrooms 8 bathrooms and 4 garages and still a family of 4 Americans may complain they feel crammed.

This is one thing the book never talks about. Americans (in particular baby boomers) are pack rats and grow strong attachments to objects and never throw them away. Japanese people on the contrary have the peculiar habit of throwing away perfectly good electronics just because they are mildly outdated. With a country that posesses a massive recycling system and a society where people separate their trash with meticulous precision, they may enjoy a similar living standard as Americans but are fine with less. Furthermore, SUVs are just not well, needed in asian megacities. You don't need to buy a car to live in Tokyo because the subway service is so good and Chinese urban families simply buy a little scooter to supplement the subway. Americans are just too used to having everything big, super size me mega meals and too much. To triple the population, Americans would have to get rid of these perks they like so much and also cities have to be torn apart and everything crammed together. It is perfectly normal for a 5 floor building in Tokyo to have 1 floor for a restaurant or store plus 6 basement underground levels for even more restaurants and stores. I always felt it strange to visit basement restaurants but it is the social norm to save space.

To make this population growth feasible, 2 out of every 3 Americans would have to get into a trade which pay quite well or be content with a GED. Too many people are getting college degrees with massive debt for jobs that don't need the degree. The US would also have to become very protectionist and bring manufacturing back and make trade taxes so high that it would be simply easier to open things domestically. The book doesn't really delve into this. It also doesn't mention tort reform would have to become the norm. People would no longer be able to sue everyone because of a menial reason. For example, those Chinese that died from a crushed poorly built building in Sichuan will definitely not bother to sue the builders. While lawyer fears are some reasons why the US has cleaner air and higher safety standards for healthcare procedures, the burden of costs fall somewhere and tripling the population won't make it go away. Excessive regulation is also a reason why childcare is unaffordable in the US.

The book doesn't have typos and despite how preposterous the concept of 1 billion Americans is to me, the author's reasoning is an amusing enough read even if I disagree with it. I do take stars off the review mostly because I felt the book could have been better organized with less rambling and more defined concepts in more chapters.

Reminded me of a point Neil deGrasse Tyson made: the US graduates 1000 PhDs in science and engineering each year. China -- 10,000. (I remember the exact number but these are the rough difference). It also resonated with the Catholic explanation for why birth control is wrong: you don't know if you're preventing the birth of the next Einstein.

I liked the explanations of how to solve practical problems like scaling transportation, reversing shrinking cities in middle America, rising housing costs in coastal cities that are applicable whether or not we go for quadrupling the population to compete in the future. And the moral point that more people increases the wealth of all Americans.

Yes! Contrary to what many assume to be true, increasing America's population—and arguably all countries across the world—is better for everyone. But I understand the counter arguments too. Fewer people consuming fewer resources and having a lower overall carbon footprint does seem the wiser choice while actively encouraging the opposite does seem to be, on the surface, wildly irresponsible.

But consider what author Matthew Yglesias is presenting here in One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Try to see passed the limited perceptions, wrong assumptions and downright pessimistic thinking and look at the actual data trends. Having more people is an indicator of prosperity and prosperous people working to put more value into their lives will over time increase the value of the world around them. More people produce more food and resources, and our best bet for countering the ill effects of climate change is not to reduce using older technologies but to invent new ones to replace the older ones.

The growth we want is certainly not going to be a consistent upward trend but we will get there. However, the task might very well be impossible without the people to achieve it. Another hurdle to getting there is political. Convincing others of this kind of brighter future is a hard sell. Not only is it long-term vs short-term thinking, but it's also a question of reversing the old belief that a bigger population is bad. Like I said, that goes against what many of us perceive to be correct.

Another way to envision the outcome is the expectation that as long we don't suffer a great setback, either as a country or as a species, then America hitting one billion might be inevitable. This is what the optimist in me believes. As long as we don't destroy ourselves, then the future is ours.½

Immigration

I enjoyed reading it and what to talk to my representatives now - especially since I'm a renter and it's timely.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think does not deserve the disparaging ratings/comments posted on Amazon. It is a fine book written by a market urbanist who explains basic supply and demand very well.

I can sum the book up with a few quotes:

"The point is that there are many ways in which expensive land can contain large numbers of people. The question is whether we’ll adopt rules that permit this rather than sticking with rules that often ban row houses and multifamily structures, generally require low buildings and large amounts of parking, and typically prescribe minimum lawn sizes—even minimum apartment sizes...This directly reduces real wages by increasing the cost of living for people in high-income metro areas. It indirectly reduces real wages by preventing people from migrating to places where job opportunities are most robust...infrastructure improvements can and should be tied to a demonstrated desire to increase population density...Progressives and urbanists need to move beyond their romance with central planning and get over their distaste for business and developers. Conservatives need to take their own ideas about economics more seriously and stop seeing all proposals for change through a lens of paranoia and resentment. Last, politicians of both parties who like to complain about “regulation” and “red tape” ought to spend some time looking at the specific area of the economy where red tape and regulation are most prevalent."

Yglesias advocates deregulation of housing and zoning, and even hypothesizes that such regulations are what is contributing to the "Great Stagnation" popularized by Tyler Cowen (my review). He aims to convince Progressives that this deregulation will lower rent in cities, shorten commutes, and improve the standards of living for people in the bottom end of the income spectrum. He criticizes conservatives for hypocritically opposing this deregulation. He explains ideas taught by Adam Smith and David Ricardo very clearly for the lay reader. In a perfect world, Yglesias would be appointed to be HUD commissioner.

4.5 stars. The only thing keeping this book from five stars is the lack of a bibliography for the economic studies Yglesias cites.

Matt Yglesias' Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.

Yglesias turns 30 this week, which means this book was written when he was 26-27. How could a 26 year old know anything? There's a reason that Yglesias' blog is widely read and widely praised on right and left-- he's got a very good sponge for a brain. He mostly posts on economic and (domestic) public policy, but this book is entirely foreign policy-- namely, Iraq. Fiasco (my review) is still the must-read book on the Iraq disaster from the inside, but Heads in the Sand is great on a look at the public politics of the time.

Yglesias is bemoaning the neoconservatives' march to Iraq invasion, and how "liberal hawks" changed their ideology to go along. How a Left who had lost its moorings on foreign policy got trounced politically in 2004.

The author doesn't spend much time examining the roots of neoconservatism, only really examining how liberals adopted similar stances to it after the Persian Gulf War (1991), Bosnia/Kosovo (1999), and, more dramatically, 9/11. His citations read like my RSS reader, looking mostly at the arguments being made via influential print media and working papers by think tanks. He examines speeches by various liberal politicians to show their lack of coherent opposition to neoconservative doctrine of American hegemony. How Howard Dean was ostracized as a left-wing nut, when he was right all along about the Iraq war. John Kerry and other candidates in 2004 were feckless in how to respond to Bush on Iraq and got roundly trounced. Leading candidates in 2007 were making similar errors, but I think Obama has basically fulfilled much of what Yglesias prescribes for the next POTUS.

I think the krux of his book is found on Pg. 187:

"Bush looked at the accumulation of agreements, treaties and institutions that had built up during the Cold War and the Clinton years and saw a United States that had unduly constrained itself...acting from the beginning to...shed international obligations in the belief that U.S. military supremacy could...remake the world. Simply put, it didn't work... [Bush's] embrace of militaristic nationalism has not brought democracy to the Middle East and has not frightened Iran or North Korea out of conducting nuclear research [, etc.]... [T]he United States...cannot effectively tackle large problems except in cooperation with others and cannot secure that cooperation unless it acts in ways that other nations recognize as compatible with their own interests. A foreign policy that accepts more constraints on what we may try to do is likely to broaden the range of things we can actually do."


I lived in a Muslim country in 2003 and remember the run-up to war, listening to Colin Powell's UN speech over a worldband radio and thinking "These guys really believe Iraq is a threat, so I guess I have to trust them. They have more information than anyone else." I also read Tom Friedman's Longitudes and Attitudes, written around that time. Friedman was a liberal hawk who just wanted the Bush Administration to be forthright about invading Iraq to set up a democracy rather than using WMD as the excuse. Yglesias never mentions Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy, which President Bush and Condie Rice were publicly pushing at the time, and basically argues that non-democracies should be confronted with force.

Neocons today argue that Iraq the Model helped spawn the Arab Spring-- seeing Iraqis go to the polls and have great democratic freedoms inspired Tarhir Square, for example. Yglesias responded recently in this post:

"Trying to achieve this by invading Iraq and getting hundreds of thousands of people killed and displaced, rather than just using our financial leverage over Egypt to press for fair elections, was nuts. But here we are."

I think Yglesias might support an argument (mine) that already-observing existing democracy and secularism in an economically expanding Islamic Turkey along with greater interconnectedness through social media combined with certain key events, like Wikileaks' exposing how corrupt and comical people like Hosni Mubarak were to the general public, helped push change along--not the multi-trillion dollar Iraq fiasco. The U.S. abandoning its pursuit of Bin Laden and invading Iraq did little but solidify Muslim suspicions of U.S. intentions and probably fueled their own nationalism. Perhaps the U.S.-led invasion helped solidify the peoples of Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain against their governments, but in a very unintended way.

I give this book 4 stars out of 5. I think Yglesias' neglect of Sharansky's obvious influence was glaring, as well as the rise of Blue Dog Democrats in Red states that pandered to the religious base-- the Christian Right was overwhelmingly pro-war-- which deserves mention in the politics. But Yglesias' elucidation of what a liberal foreign policy should be was very helpful to someone like myself. I am pretty squarely in line with Yglesias' outline.

This is a great introduction into how the Iraq War got started, and shed a lot on what has been going on in the States to an outsider, but there is a danger of seeing the UK's action as simply the result of US domestic politics. What role did UK hawks and doves have in the lead up to and during the Iraq War?

Starts out a little shaky, but quickly settles into humorous and thoughtful blog-like style commentary. A very nice mix of political considerations and substantive policy thinking.½