Matthew Yglesias, the author of “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger,” thinks it would be great if America were that populous. He

Matthew Yglesias Thinks There Should Be ‘One Billion Americans’

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2021-07-23 12:30:07

Matthew Yglesias, the author of “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger,” thinks it would be great if America were that populous. He also admits that there’s no real political constituency for such a policy. Conservatives think the country is already full, he notes, while liberals tend to think the same thing about their own towns and cities.

The question is moot, anyway. Even if everybody wanted America to grow to one billion people, it would never happen. Yglesias himself concedes that the concept is “impossible and absurd.” The arithmetic is pretty simple: There are about 330 million Americans right now, which means that getting to one billion would mean adding 670 million net new humans. For comparison, the aggregate population of Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras and the rest of Central America is not much more than 205 million.

To put it another way: China did manage to grow from 330 million people to more than one billion people, but it did so against a backdrop of 180 years of global population growth. With the world’s population expected to start shrinking in about 45 years, there’s no way that the United States is going to repeat that feat.