Yeah, Yglesias says some things that are just head-shaking sometimes. I generally like the guy, and sometimes he’s very on point.
And sometimes he says things like this that fulfill the definition of this thread:
magnet
3665
You can achieve all those liberal ideals without tripling the population. In fact, that’s exactly what the EU is doing.
Tripling the population for its own sake is dumb. Trying to “win” a population race against China is even dumber.
A US with a billion people would have a population density less than half what Germany has today. It would have a lower population density than France. The US is relatively empty.
rrmorton
3667
Along with adding more people, I’ve been dreaming up a scenario where a liberal billionaire incentivizes young, progressive employees to move to those empty, red states to live in pop-up tech villages and start Gerrymandering 2.0 on a massive scale.
If you’ve seen Wild Wild Country on Netflix, you get the general idea but we scale it up. Move in voters en masse and freak those locals right the fuck out. (Hippie orgies optional but encouraged.) We could sell it like military service where we move young voters during their 20s and then let them move back to the desirable cities and suburbs of America after their tour of duty voting where we need them.
Now that we’ve all learned to work remotely, I think this plan has legs.
magnet
3668
The problems are not caused by population density. Tripling the population would triple the resources used by the US, at a time when we should be striving to reduce consumption.
Tortilla
3669
I guess it depends on how long a timeframe we are looking at. Implementing progressive ideas that promote growth will obviously grow the population over the longer term. Especially if we remove all the financial disincentives to procreation. So if we wait long enough than 1B Americans seems inevitable. But I do find the argument that we can triple the US population that way alone, in the near term, to be a little suspect.
Tortilla
3670
Tripling food consumption isn’t really problematic, we are incredibly wasteful with agriculture in the US. I mean, we dedicate tons of arable land to producing ethanol for crying out loud. Water might be more challenging but ought to be beatable with proper engineering. I don’t see any technical reason we couldn’t produce triple the current power using a mix of nuclear/wind/solar/hydro to avoid running out of coal or oil.
What resources are you exactly talking about here?
Yeah, but it would take CCP-level environmental engineering to make the mountains, prairies, and deserts that make up the “empty” parts of the US maintainable population centers.
Tortilla
3672
Uh what? Speaking as someone who lives in a city on aforesaid prairie there’s no tricky engineering required. The only reason there aren’t more cities is that that there aren’t more people and no industries currently encouraging immigration. The water/land/power/food are already present and can be boosted easily if population grows.
magnet
3673
Sure, and if we wait long enough then a Dow of 100,000 seems inevitable. It is a byproduct of success. But we would rightly laugh at anyone arguing that we could solve America’s problems and/or achieve liberal goals by tripling the Dow.
I am talking about the real world, where food isn’t free, energy produces CO2, and adding new people won’t solve either problem.
Maybe we should fix America’s most glaring issues before we scale everything up.
I suspect you may be underestimating the impact dropping a small metro area of say 5 million people in the middle of Nebraska would do to the local water tables, at the very least.
I hear the Colorado river is a boundless source of fresh, clean water for all communities along its route from the Rockies to the Pacific that nobody ever has to argue over.
Tortilla
3675
That doesn’t add up to me.
Food isn’t free, but we have the ability to easily feed triple our current population with just the resources we have now. It means cutting into food exports and we stop growing crops for ethanol and so forth, but totally do-able. Energy producing CO2 I already addressed with Nuclear/Solar/Wind/Hydro. Adding new people promotes growth economically, at least as long as individual human labor holds value.
I’m not buying the angle that more population automatically equals environmental disaster.
Tortilla
3676
There’s basically a huge inland sea under the great plains. There’s plenty of water. It would mean reigning in water for irrigation which would piss off the corporate ag interests but I consider that more of an unintended positive.
magnet
3677
Totally doable does not mean it will happen.
Our population increased 25% over the last 25 years. Which liberal goals has this helped us achieve?
Only in the most useless of measures, where one country is ranked against another without reference to population.
If France and Italy were merged into one country, it would have about twice the population of either country alone. Yet I doubt there would be much meaningful difference in the lives of Fratalians.
For that matter, Western democracies come in all sizes, and I don’t see much evidence that the bigger ones are better off than the smaller ones.
Pyperkub
3678
I always felt that Obama should have made a hyper-liberal/progressive recess appointment immediately, then nominated Garland.
Not sure how that would’ve worked. Scalia died on February 13, 2016 while the senate was in session.
Given the 10-day recess guideline for the senate to be in recess, the earliest Obama could’ve made a recess appointment of this type would’ve been after July 28, 2016. If there was any remote noise in the wind of a recess appointment during that time from July 28 through September 5, McConnell would’ve ended the recess and gotten a quorum within hours.
Alstein
3681
Simple- offer more pay if you telework from a swing state, and less for states with heavy Dem majorities.
Also tell convicts that they’ll have their convictions expunged/dismissed if they move to a swing state and don’t come back for 10 years. Like the old go to boot camp or go to jail.
Coventry, in other words.
Adding one billion Americans through immigration will not require more food or energy in the world, which is what matters. Those people are going to eat and use energy no matter where they live.
No, not really. Many of the ‘empty’ places are far from deserts, prairies, mountains. In any event, if you’re importing lots of immigrants, you’ll have plenty of labor, and they’ll need jobs, and the result of that sort of development is called economic stimulus. That’s partly his point.
He’s really only extending Piketty’s thesis: if it turns out that virtually all economic growth in history has been a function of population growth, we should want more population growth here.
