In December the California Department of Finance announced in this press release that the state grew more slowly in percentage terms than at any time since 1900. Yes, that’s 1900, not 1990. The July to July growth rate was 0.05 percent, down from 0.23 percent the previous year, also a record low.
In a way this doesn’t worry me much. I have no intention of following Elon Musk to Texas. But then again, I am not Elon Musk. My job as a public school teacher and my wife’s job as a certified nurse-midwife both depend on population growth.
Maybe this is one reason I bought Matthew Yglesias’ new book One Billion Americans. A bigger reason is that I loved the intellectual provocation and sense of humor in the title. In truth I love Yglesias’ whole public persona – he’s voracious, funny, gentle, unapologetically non-pious, and has something to say about practically everything. His podcast The Weeds is great fun. Yglesias is one version of who I want to be when I grow up, even though I think I’m his elder in years by more than a decade.
But the deeper reason I bought Yglesias’ book is that at some level I take the provocation in his title seriously, and I think he does too. The relationship between economic growth and population growth is a deep and time-honored topic in economics , dating back at least to Malthus. I don’t know about a billion people living in this country, but it seems to me that if a great nation wants to survive it needs to grow. A family-friendly growth agenda could also be a way to heal our divided politics.
With that said, One Billion Americans isn’t always convincing. Yglesias, the breezy policy polymath, falls victim to his own talents. He proposes a panoply of arguments rapid-fire and frames his book with a geopolitical statement about the need to compete with China and India that left me cold. “The point of this book is the proposition that we ought to take decisive steps to avoid falling behind China,” Yglesias intones in the opening chapter. I think Yglesias should know better than to so blithely invoke great power competition, or risk the derisive laughter that could arise from suggesting a baby race, even tangentially. He has too many other genuinely important points.
But because I so enjoy his voice I kept on listening (I bought the audio version) as Yglesias reeled through musings about marriage penalties, the profound upsides of immigration, baby boxes, depopulated “comeback cities,” urban form, child allowances, transportation policy, climate change, alternative energy, and urban housing production, among others. Most of these topics could have merited their own book, and Yglesias makes a several audacious claims that need unpacking to say the least. My favorite was the notion America could hold three billion people if it had the same population density as merry green England (heck, why stop at just one billion?).
Still, I appreciate Yglesias ambition and his encyclopedic policy mind. One Billion Americans is a readable and important book, and I recommend you buy it. Of course, I have no hope of commenting intelligently on all the policy arguments Yglesias brings up. But I do want to highlight his ideas in two areas that strike close to the primary focus of this website: “pro-natalist” initiatives to make for easier and happier family life, and housing production.
Let’s take housing production first. Yglesias takes this issue on in the seventh chapter of One Billion Americans, noting that scarce housing in expensive metropolitan areas acts as a brake on population growth. With bracing optimism, he states that “policy solutions to housing scarcity are easily at hand.” The easy solutions he lists all have decidedly libertarian flavor, with a catch. No friend of single-family zoning, Yglesias extols efforts in Oregon and elsewhere to get rid of it. He praises stick-built mid-rise apartment buildings as a technological godsend when it comes to middle income housing production and exhorts municipal leaders not to be swayed by those who would block progress over the aesthetics of these structures (see here or a link to an interesting piece in Curbed that looks at the debate over big stick-built apartments, which have taken over whole neighborhoods in my childhood hometown of Seattle). Yglesias mocks twee historic preservation laws in his hometown Washington, DC and lifts up leaders in Houston who reduced required lot sizes within the city’s I-610 loop from 5,000 square feet to as low as 1,400 square feet. This deregulatory move has induced an “explosion” of townhouse development, a response, according to Ygleisas, to “pent up demand for denser housing types even in city that’s synonymous with sprawl.”
The catch to this sunny libertarian narrative is that while Yglesias is too artful to quite come out and say so directly, he lacks faith in the ability of local governments to make the free-market housing dream he proposes come true. State and federal invention is needed to protect local communities from their own worst exclusionary impulses. But even here, the author is optimistic. As an owner-developer of an accessory dwelling unit in California, I was pleased to see Yglesias praise new laws passed by California State Legislature to make it easier to build ADU’s. Describing the success of these recent laws, Yglesias concludes that “what it takes, fundamentally, is for state legislatures to want to reduce housing scarcity.”
Based on my personal experience, California’s new ADU laws would certainly have helped my family. My wife and I built our ADU just before the new laws were passed, and I still remember the dark warnings I heard from a municipal employee at the City of Sacramento public permitting counter about the 1990 psychological horror movie Pacific Heights. In this movie, which I have still never seen despite my fondness for Melanie Griffiths, the tenant from hell ruins the life of a nice landlord couple. Other dark warnings from a different City employee about twelve-thousand dollars in “developer impact fees” scared me more that the horror movie anecdote, although with help from our local Councilman we managed to reduce this to about five thousand.
But no-one said real estate development in California would be easy or cheap. Nor does anyone describe parenting is easy, which is why I want to end with what seems to me the true core of Yglesias’ book. This comes in Chapter Three, on the “Dismal Economics of Child Rearing,” and Chapter Four, on “Taking Families Seriously.” This is a fraught issue ideologically, so Yglesias starts with a data-driven argument also advanced by others on the political left, where the most withering criticisms are most likely to arise.
The argument is that serious disjuncture exists between the number of children women say they want to have, and the number of children they actually end up having (see this New York Times piece). This disjuncture is so large as to seem a quiet tragedy in terms of people achieving their life desires, but Yglesias points out that the topic of family formation remains oddly at the outer orbit of policy debate. “The current debate in the United States is so far off the mark in terms of really living up to society’s obligation to parents,” Yglesias states, “that the most serious plan to deal with it comes not from any of Washington’s mainstream think tanks, but from an outfit called the People’s Policy Project.” I checked out this plan, perhaps too-whimsically called the “Family Fun Pack” and was impressed by arguments put forward by Matt Bruenig, People’s Policy Project founder and spouse of New York Times columnist Elizabeth Bruenig. You should check it out too.
Yglesias describes Bruenig’s Fun Pack as an “ambitious and sensible policy agenda,” and his proposals in One Billion Americans to a large extent follow the People’s Policy Project script, although Yglesias takes a pass on Bruenig’s proposal for free health care for kids (I like this idea). Yglesias decries the U.S. status as a global outlier in terms of paid parental leave, and touches my teacher heart with arguments about the need for more paid vacation in America to make everyone happier, parents and kids especially.
These are national issues, mostly, but in terms of an issue that local government or mayor could conceivably address, both Yglesias and Bruenig propose the interesting notion of a universal “baby box.” In Finland, where baby boxes got their start, this is “literally a cardboard box that contains body suits, a sleeping bag, outdoor gear, bathing products for the baby, as well as nappies and a small mattress.” The extent to which body suits and outdoor gear might truly be necessary where I live in hot Sacramento as opposed to cold Finland is questionable, but the symbolism of a baby box is not questionable. This is seems especially true if the box were provided universally (not as a welfare benefit) and filled with high quality items that even richer families would want to use. “Universal provision,” notes Yglesias, “emphasizes a correct desire to subsidize children and child rearing as such as socially valuable activity that ought to be encouraged.”
A baby box is not going to fundamentally change anyone’s family fortunes by itself, though I think it might be a smart policy move for a place like Sacramento where attractiveness to families is part of the city’s core value proposition. In fact, conscious moves to attract ambitious young families (including immigrant families) might be a smart economic development policy for many mayors all across the country, much smarter than the wasteful tax incentive policies for business relocation that pass for “local economic development” here in the US. I hope to write more on this in a future post.
Yglesias (and Bruenig) also promote an idea I absolutely love, the universal child allowance. This idea has potential to dramatically reduce the number of children in poverty (Yglesias notes the appalling fact that 21 percent of U.S. children now live in poverty). While expensive, a child allowance could be paid for with clever shifts to tax structures including the Child Tax Credit, the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, among others. This link to research piece through The Century Foundation highlights some of the issues connected to a child allowance, and also discusses Canada’s recent pro-natalist tax policy reboot. The People’s Policy Project site mentioned earlier also includes engaging arguments for the child welfare allowance idea.
I don’t know, in the end, about whether the United States ought to ever play home to one billion people. And even after reading his book, I am not certain that Yglesias truly wants to see this kind of population growth himself. But I am willing to take his rhetorical provocation in stride, and I would definitely love to see actions like the universal child allowance, the baby box, and pro-housing liberalization of land use policy. Making child rearing easier for everyone would make all American cities happier and more prosperous.