While I find Yglesias interesting some of the time, at others he's a great example of the flaw of Philosophy majors becoming policy guys. By that, I mean the reliance on deductive reasoning. Philosophers have a set of ideas that they use to understand the world, but that can lead to forcing the world through that lens. I think I've written about the Fox and the Hedgehog before, but basically a Fox knows many small things and the Hedgehog knows one big thing. Foxes are much better at predicting the future, because their broad range of knowledge exempts them from a sort of Dunning-Kruger knock-on effect. They know what they don't know, but they also know a lot of other little things. They are better with uncertainty.
Yglesias' Big Idea is in his book One Billion Americans, and he tends to focus enormous time to arguing about NIMBYism and other restraints in American population growth. He's absolutely right that America should be embracing more immigrants, but he tries to force the current China/US economic warfare through this lens and it just feels off.
Additionally, I think we already HAVE one billion Americans, but not in the way Yglesias typically argues. If you add up the population of the United States, the EU, Japan and various post-colonial British countries, you get close to a billion people. There are obvious political implications for increased global connectedness that manifest in jingoism that we saw in Brexit, but the Global West is a thing, and we are seeing that in real time in support for Ukraine.
This is why the current status of the United States is such an important inflection point. The world need the US to be a global force for democracy and some aspects of free markets. Trumpism repudiates not only democracy at home, but democratic ideals abroad.
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