The Case for Adding 672 Million More Americans | Hacker News Reader

The Case for Adding 672 Million More Americans

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56 pointspseudolus63 comments

This is something I always thought as a kid. Just look at a map... why arent there like a billion people in the US? This makes sense to a child because it's so simple. But reality is more complicated.

2/3rds of the US lives east of the Mississippi river. So if we had that level of density across the US, we would have 650m people. So east of the Mississippi is pretty close to being populated at that level.

The central plains is rapidly draining the water table. So it's unlikely we'll be able to continue farming it at the rate we have been (unless technology improves to reduce water usage), much less increase output. To illustate this, I love this image in [0] figure 2 on the first page. Water in an aquifer is stored in small cavities in the rock/soil/etc, and when you drain it enough, the ground literally collapses.. meaning you can never refill it. Our farmers now have to drill deeper than every before, and some farmers are just put out of business entirely... and that's today.

And the west is arguably already overpopulated. We literally drain the Colorado river. We already need more desalination plants as it is.

If we put a billion people in the US, it would look very much like China. China has a similar geography problem. So when you imagine the US with a billion people, just imagine them all packed in on the east coast with some of the same problems as China (food supply, pollution, etc).

0. https://water.usgs.gov/ogw/pubs/fs00165/SubsidenceFS.v7.PDF

This is because water usage is not priced, and that we wasted water in the most inefficient manner.

Land is cheap, sun is free, and water is effectively free. We could switch to aquaponic, which is water and land efficient, but that's expensive.

That's very expensive... and consider we live in a globalized economy, that would just result in more food imports. Again, China has a similar problem, and they import food... because the economics of that solution just don't work unless the rest of the world agrees (and they won't).

I kind of agree, I do think open immigration policies are admirable, but striving for a billion, seems far-fetched. We definitely shouldn't encourage more children, we shouldn't hinder people from having them who want them, but we shouldn't reward it, that just creates shitty parents who just had kids for the monetary gain they thought they'd get out of it.

However, crises are on the forefront with global warming, covid, depression, and who knows what else over the next 20 years. The only way something like this would work is if we also could manage to bring all the manufacturing back to America, and by some miracle it wasn't 90% automated.

Seems to me though the more people your country has, the more are going to die when the water wars/droughts begin next 20 years or so. I'm in Utah, and as you said resources are sparse here. My town almost completely ran out of water this year and had to fine people for watering lawns.

tldr: I'm a leftist socialist, pro-open borders person, but I think we need to focus more on shoring up our nation, country, social programs, and supporting the people we do have and get through covid/depression before we worry about tripling our population. Cause we need to make sure we have the resources to support that esp out west.

That said I'm for open borders, along w/ a VAT that would be higher for non-citizens. Let people come/work/live but subsidize the rest of us for the privilege.

"always thought as a kid"

Exactly this is a "harvard grad" with the reasoning and logic skills of a child.

- Assumption that every inch of land is equal to any other. Nope.

- Generally take zero quality of life issues into account.

- "Adding americans" Bringing in a nearly 2:1 ratio of immigrants is not "adding americans" that is replacing an entire country with immigrants. This would not be America but the country that the majority of those people came from. America would be flat out no questions dead as a country. All of human history teaches us that this would simply lead to a multiple country war in America as immigrants self divide into micro countries, just like the middle east.

"21.1 percent of American children are living in poverty, compared with 11.3 percent of German children and just 9.3 percent of Swedish children, even though the U.S. is richer on average than either Germany or Sweden."

Dishonest. First, the poverty rate for children was 16.2% in 2018 (latest data from https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26...). Second, the income calculated by Census for this measure doesn't include things like food stamps or housing subsidies (https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26...). If they are included, the poverty rate becomes a lot lower. Increasing spending on social programs that address poverty can have no effect on the poverty rate.

I guess it's essentially the divide between "are they living in poverty" (is their family very poor) and "are they living in misery" (no food, no heat, etc). Programs can address the latter without fixing the former, but that doesn't necessarily mean the programs are a failure - gotta measure the right things and measure them properly.

Except for my childhood birthday parties, I can't think of a time when I thought, "God, I wish this was three times as crowded."

The US is so sparsely inhabited (in almost every way) yet many citizens think it's already full.

Sparsely inhabited compared to what? 100 years ago? Australia? China? Sweden? Rwanda?

You say that as if it's a bad thing, but perhaps it's the goal? Some of the least densely populated countries are the happiest and healthiest. Some of the most densely populated countries are the poorest and unhappiest. Regardless, we're at the point where we need to seriously consider the long-term sustainability of the current global population level.

> Some of the most densely populated countries are the poorest and unhappiest.

Sure, there's a golden mean between slums and unwalkable suburbs/exurbs.

Interestingly the urbanization percentage for the US is basically the same as for Norway 82.5%. And interestingly Oslo about tenth of the size of LA has comparable density: https://www.ssb.no/a/english/kortnavn/beftett_en/fig-2011-06... (per km^2) https://i.redd.it/v84al8v4ymp11.png (per mi^2)

"About 14% Americans live in the nation's rural counties, 54% in its suburbs and small metros and about 30% in its urban core counties" (data from 2016)

and in Europe "In 2018, 39.3% of the population lived in the cities, 31.6% lived in towns and suburbs, and 29.1% lived in rural areas"

> Regardless, we're at the point where we need to seriously consider the long-term sustainability of the current global population level.

Well, this sounds like the good old Malthus argument, but we're nowhere near carrying capacity of Earth.

... the problem is that the cost and environmental impact of certain lifestyles are unsustainable.

I read somewhere that "butter side down" people write pieces easy for the "butter side up" crowd to dunk on.

The dunks amplify the message well beyond the attention the original author could muster.

I don't understand; are you saying the author doesn't actually want this, but just wants to be a strawman?

Yglesias is a divisive enough figure who has been around for a long enough time that he could pull a thesis out of a hat, noodle around for 100 pages without ever building a recognizable argument, hire a couple of interns to pad it out to 300 pages (when extensive back matter is included), arrange for a well-orchestrated pay-for-review campaign to get some small fraction of the public excited or perturbed, and then just about pay for the advance (after extensive publishing-company accounting shenanigans). So, that's what he does. He doesn't actually give a hoot whether there are more or fewer Americans.

A simpler explanation: the guy sincerely believes there should be more Americans and is also decent at self-promotion (which is how he got where he is).

Not so sure about that, given his claim that "it’s worth emphasizing that while 1 billion Americans may be impossible and absurd, there’s actually nothing hard about it."

Impossible and absurd, politically perhaps?

Everything I know about him leads me to believe he truly, sincerely believes in the thesis of the book.

The thesis is manifestly insane. Do you know him to be insane? This "explanation" is always "simple", but rarely accurate.

Argh! Yes, there's a lot of empty space in the U.S. but land area is not the limiting factor on population growth, and never has been. At the moment the limiting factor appears to be planet-wide carbon emissions, and we are already way past the point of sustainability with respect to that. We need to be talking about reducing the world's population, otherwise there will just be that many more people who have to suffer through the climate apocalypse that is surely coming.

It is rich people that pollute the most, so our objective should be focused on reducing negative externalities, especially reducing excessive consumption(which correspond to pollution) that don't contribute to our quality of life.

Remember, the sun gives more energy in an hour to the earth than our entire civilization consume in an entire year. It's clearly not a resource problem.

What if we eat the rich?

By rich, I meant the American people are the rich.

Warren Buffett is 50% bodyfat. Bill Gates is like 20%. Bezos, Zuck, and Elon are like 10%.

There is a lot of variability for the meat content of the rich.

Rich people pollute the most, but that means that as non-rich people become richer (as they are rapidly now doing as a result of globalization), pollution increases substantially over time. Likely at a higher rate than you can offset with externality pricing because good luck getting developing nations to agree to that.

Don’t rich people also drive the economy? They buy lots of goods and services from other people. They own businesses which employ people. They invest capital in income producing business that create value and employ people. They donate money which helps others (albeit for tax benefits). And if they park their money in cash in their backyard then they are reducing the circulates money supply which slows inflation and keeps prices of burritos for the Plebians from doubling every 10 years as we have grown accustomed to. What can rich people do that is not helpful to the economy (ie other people)? Even money spent on fancy meals, Ferrari’s, yachts all keep regular people and their families fed! It’s such a fallacy to point a our fingers at the rich!

I meant something more mundane like inefficient land use policies, which mandates consumption of motor vehicles by which only a wealthy society likes ours can afford. Arguably, the consumption of those goods doesn't really contribute to the well being of our society, rich or poor.

If your priors are oriented toward anti-natalism, this is the logical argument to make. Mine are not. I think anti-natalism is a failure state. I haven't heard any compelling arguments about why we shouldn't try our very best to innovate our way out of our crises instead.

Of course, innovation means reorganizing the entire world economy around R&D, and that means (among other things) throwing the gates open to any immigrant with talent. Too many Einsteins are stuck in countries with failed institutions, where their talents can't be harnessed. It is critical for the survival of humanity to try and get as many of them to our shores as possible, and do the research we desperately need done.

> I haven't heard any compelling arguments about why we shouldn't try our very best to innovate our way out of our crises instead.

Innovation and population reduction (or at least stabilization) are not mutually exclusive.

> reorganizing the entire world economy around R&D

Yeah. Good luck with that.

> It is critical for the survival of humanity to try and get as many of them to our shores as possible

Why? Is there some law of physics that prevents innovation from happening outside the borders of the United States?

Not a law of physics, no, but obviously empirical evidence suggests that the US has the greatest scientific output in the world. Other countries can build up their institutions too, but the US is desperate for research and engineering talent.

> We need to be talking about reducing the world's population

That's going to happen. Look at the table on the right:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

Dropping dropping dropping. The global replacement rate is 2.33, soon we'll be below that.

once you get past the xenophobia, most americans will realize that the only way to continue the properity and global power we've enjoyed over the past century is to import more people because we're not making enough here. it's literally the playbook for sustainably growing an otherwise mature and stagnating economy.

moreover, incumbent americans are just too risk-averse to innovate or invest in real innovation vs paper gains. the wealthy and powerful among us have been in hardcore harvest mode for 40 years and we're gradually, collectively losing our knowledge and ability to plow and sow. instead, we're all on social media trying to out-shizzle each other.

> incumbent americans are just too risk-averse to innovate or invest in real innovation vs paper gains

Can you expand on this? Native born Americans prefer to play the stock market than starting new businesses?

"... most americans will realize that the only way to continue the properity and global power we've enjoyed over the past century is to import more people ..."

Given the global externalities produced by that prosperity and global power, why is it obvious that "most americans" would want that to continue ?

It may, in fact, be the case that importing citizens is the only way to continue this, but it's not obvious that there aren't other modes of living and growing.

Living things are born, they mature, then grow old and die ... mature living things don't consume the same resources or create the same outputs as juvenile living things. That's not necessarily bad ...

> "...why is it obvious that "most americans" would want that to continue ?"

because the pie doesn't grow otherwise, and folks are fighting over the pie we have already. also, a growing pie doesn't mean maintaining the same inefficiencies/externalities we've gotten used to. part of the imported innovation will have to go towards mitigating those very problems if the growth is to be sustainable.

I think at issue is this economic concept of eternal growth. It's rather plainly obvious endless growth isn't sustainable, for myriad reasons. Continuing to believe growth will get us out of our growth-induced nightmare is the equivalent of plugging ones ears and chanting "la la la la la"

The entire history of the country is thus. The Alien and Sedition Act, then there was the Know Nothing Party, the Immigration Act. There is serious scholarship in this area of history, smart people have devoted lifetimes of hard work to researching and writing about it. We import people and then we oscillate the other way.

The case for .7B more Americans isn't worth reading. The human species is alread above the carrying capacity of the Earth, and this is a title that's too stupid to warrant reading the article below it.

Sounds more like the only way to keep a ponzie scheme running. If you want real growth you need to invent new things and develop new resources. Only rent seekers want more people / suckers.

that's nowhere near a novel observation. the baby boomers, for instance, mortgaged our futures in the form of real estate, education, finance, insurance, and healthcare (and more) for their own wealth indulgences. that's all paper growth, not real growth.

Bigger markets have the possibility to be more efficient. This is a very important and overlooked factor.

Simply lifting many US folks out of poverty would help tremendously.

Interesting article but I am not sure if this is satire or not. There are many projects the country could or should take on but making an effort to massively increase population seems just lunacy to me. There are already problems with pollution and water resources. Why make these things much worse?

This has been Australia's secret sauce for the last 20 something years - growth by immigration has meant no recession, until now of course. Australias population was low, still is really.

I don't feel like the article discusses the economic reasons to increase our population count deeply enough. We're a consumer economy, so when population count slows or stagnates near mid this century, markets will suffer. Japan's GDP has slowed to around ~1% per annum, in large part due to their stalling population count. That has hurt people in every walk of life, not only those exposed to financial markets.

Canada is taking these projections seriously, and therefore has incredibly generous immigration policies, aiming to grow their population by nearly 200% by 2100 [0]. This video is definitely worth watching! They seem to be taking cues that have been gleamed off of protectionist and introverted policies that have inflicted harm on other states in the past. China under Mao, for example. It will be interesting seeing what the effect their approach will have vs one in diametric opposition such as modern-day GB.

Immigration does come with problems absolutely; but I'd be more for expanding immigration domestically than by increasing the birth rate, while we still haven't figured out larger problems like pollution and climate change.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1jat2-zI98

> That has hurt people in every walk of life

How has it hurt them?

> That has hurt people in every walk of life, not only those exposed to financial markets.

Seconding sumedh's comment, what's your basis for this statement?

I'm sure there are multiple ways to look at the data and an argument can be made for both sides; but generally speaking I feel like a rising tide lifts most boats. Or to be said differently, rising GDP creates the greatest good for the greatest number of people. (ex. Amazon in Seattle, not everyone shares in the wealth city's new wealth explosion, but most would argue the net wealth creation is positive).

Even better, Western European countries that are relatively speaking highly productive and also socially supportive can boast better quality of life for their residents no matter where they fall on the income ladder. That is in opposition to countries with low productivity, or weak social safety nets. The US may be the latter, but that is a different debate. A slowing GDP won't fix that problem; though, I think it is likely that weak social systems impact those at the bottom of the income distribution more than a relatively lower GDP.

You're going to be very hard pressed to find any data to support your view. GDP growth has basically nothing to do with quality of life. For that, on the economic side, you would look at median real GDP per capita adjusted for PPP. For example, [1]. Raw GDP growth could boost that over time, or it could all flow to a minority of people and leave the majority of the population worse off, or it could go hand in hand with price inflation and corresponding drop in PPP, or your population could be growing just as fast as your GDP, etc.

Consider also [2], which adjusts a common measure of general citizenry well-being for inequality. Japan routinely is in the top 5 on this list while countries with much higher GDP growth are not.

As a third point, keep in mind that HN and reddit favorite "life is best here country" Norway rarely tops 2% GDP growth, and a big chunk of that is attributable to oil exports. If your population is relatively stable and sufficiently developed, you really don't need GDP growth to improve quality of life, you just have to properly invest your GDP in the right places.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Quality_Index

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequalit...

He comes close to, but never really makes an argument as why this should be a goal. Why is having the largest GDP any more important than having the tallest skyscraper or the most Olympic medals? Ultimately, what is the telos of a nation?

I've been traveling in New England. The sights of aging population are everywhere. Entire towns are run only by the old who may die in a few years. Where are the young people? They are in cities or suburbs of course.

Rural America is decaying for sure.

However, the fix is not to indiscriminately add more humans.

We should make legal immigration streamlined and targeted. Have a target for the year and remove the bureaucracy so people can move in quick allowing us to reach said targets.

But yes, country statistics competition wise, we are about to lose to China asap. Especially with the leadership we have at the top right now.

When I was born in 1972, the global population was roughly half of what it is now. It was like living in a world after Thanatos snapped his fingers... I'm not sure how they were able to survive.

In [another 50] years the population will double again, and everyone then will look back at today and be amazed there were so few people. They'll make a movie where there's "only" 7.8 billion people left and it'll be a blockbuster.

(Assuming there's still a functioning democracy then.)

* Edited. See below.

> In 30 years the population will double again

How would it double if the population growth rate has been falling down for decades?

Actually, yeah, it looks to be about 60 years if things don't change... My bad. I misread a chart on Wikipedia earlier, just used this instead:

https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...

If you'd like to wager that the population will be > 15B in 2050, you will find lots of people eager to take the other side of that bet.

It is an interesting argument but I wonder if tripling the amount of people in the USA would result in denser cities or more smaller cities and overall less farm land. It certainly wouldn't be distributed equally.

The idea gives me a real feeling of Not In My Back Yard. If they want to make denser residential areas in cities that is fine but I like my low real estate prices and having a house instead of being in an apartment building.

Tokyo have lot of single family housing and remains affordable for middle class.

You just don't get lawns or backyard, which is fine by me. Lawns are unwanted busyworks.

With the same logic we should add 1850 Million more Russians. The number will keep them warn in the tundra.

That's a brilliant idea. I think the US should open its gates to people of all races which could benefit its economy. (from computer scientists to construction workers)

No thanks.

> When America faced down Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, we were the big dog.

I regret even clicking on this drivel.

I assume he meant facing them down at different points in time. I’m pretty sure Matt Yglesias knows that the Soviet Union was our ally against the Nazis.

Let's start by moving 1 million people each out of the major cities.

This is a Matthew Yglesias book advertisement. It's an extremely partisan excerpt by a Vox co-founder who likes the controversy.

I'm not sure if it even counts as partisan. It's so goofy that everyone regardless of team affiliation will find something with which to disagree. This is book marketing, troll-style.

It’s not an advertisement, it’s an excerpt.

Printing excerpts or serializing longer works is a staple form of journalism.

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