In making this case, he advocates changing several government policies beyond immigration. In fact, he writes much more about those policy changes than he does about immigration policy. So, for example, we learn more about his proposals for government-funded childcare, housing, and transportation policy than we do about how many new people and what kinds of people he wants to let into the country each year. He does say he does not want open borders, but he does not say what immigration reform he wants instead.

On the non-immigration issues, he vacillates between intolerance of other people’s choices and great tolerance: he is intolerant of voluntary contracts between employers and employees that do not include paid parental leave, but he is highly tolerant of people’s decisions about what kinds of dwellings to live in. Where he is tolerant, he makes a good case. Where he is not, the book fails. Still, the big picture he paints is good: he shows that we can relatively easily triple the U.S. population without making our country too crowded or overly stressing most of our institutions.

Keeping America great: As noted above, Yglesias’s major argument is that the United States should continue to be the dominant country in the world. He makes a tight case that without a major increase in population, China will become the dominant world power, but he does not say why that would be bad. It is true that China has a much worse government than ours. It is also true that a more powerful China would be the dominant force in Asia — but it already is. It is hard to imagine China directly threatening the United States militarily; the Pacific Ocean makes for a great moat.

Fortunately, you need not share Yglesias’s concern about China to agree with his goal of a much larger U.S. population through immigration. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. While Yglesias does not mention Smith, he makes Smith’s argument: by having more people in a given area, we can have more variety and our standard of living can increase. He gives a simple example: if a neighborhood gets dense enough to support two national coffee chains, that generates “better matches between consumers and coffee.” The result is increased productivity, even if that is hard to measure. The coffee shop example might seem trivial, but the point scales. With higher density, you get more and better restaurants and more niche tastes satisfied across the board. He also notes that with more immigrants we get more innovation.

One of my disappointments is that he is more of a nationalist than I expected. I understand that to persuade most Americans to favor massive immigration, one probably needs to point out the benefits of immigration to Americans. But Yglesias only occasionally mentions that there would be massive gains to the immigrants themselves, many of whom are close to starving in their native countries, especially now in the midst of COVID-19, and almost all of whom would experience large increases in their real income if they came to the United States.

Yglesias points out that in 2018 the U.S. fertility rate fell to an all-time low of 1.72 births over the lifetime of the average woman. He argues, probably correctly, that an important factor causing women to have fewer children is the increasing cost of raising them. Whether the primary caretaker is a woman or a man, the persistent growth in real wages is raising the opportunity cost of rearing children. The law of demand rears its ugly head: when the price of something rises, then, all else equal, people buy less of it.

In a book that advocates massive increases in immigration, a natural next step to take would be to argue for reducing the cost of child rearing by allowing millions of immigrants, probably disproportionately women, into the United States from the poorest countries in Latin America, such as Guatemala and El Salvador, the poorest countries in Africa, such as Zimbabwe and the Congo, and the poorest countries in Asia, such as India. It would not be hard to get 50 million immigrants from those places in a period of, say, five years. They would benefit and many current U.S. families would benefit from a dramatic fall in the cost of childcare.

But that is not where Yglesias goes. Instead, he advocates massive new government programs to subsidize the provision of childcare. He writes that “the United States has been shamefully slow compared with some peer countries to provide subsidized child care.” But the closest he comes to explaining why U.S. policy is shameful is to argue that because other countries are doing it, we should too.

Missing figures: In a book by an obviously numerate author, Yglesias is, at key points, surprisingly uninterested in important numbers. For instance, he advocates having the federal government give families $3,600 upfront for every birth and then $300 per month until the kid turns 17. A numerate reader will do the math: The United States has about 70 million people less than 17 years old. Therefore, the annual cost of the monthly payments would be over $250 billion. That’s not a small number. With almost five million births a year, the annual cost of the bonus would be an additional $18 billion. And those numbers assume that Yglesias’s plan does not induce more births — that is, does not accomplish what he wants. More births, of course, would mean a higher cost.

Another important number missing from the book is what economists would call the “elasticity of supply” of children with respect to the “price” of children. Yglesias’s purpose with the child subsidy is to bring down the perceived price of having children. A reasonable estimate is that the average amount of time spent raising children in their first 17 years is 10 hours per week, obviously front-loaded in the first few years. At an average parental wage of $20 an hour (surely an underestimate), that is about $10,000 a year. So, his proposal would reduce the perceived price by about 36%. Would that lead to 10% more children, 50% more children, or some number in between? I don’t expect Yglesias to know; no one does. But he needs to discuss the matter.

Moreover, with my alternative proposal of having tens of millions of women from poor countries be nannies hired by parents, the price of raising kids could easily fall by 36%, with the huge additional benefit that the cost to taxpayers would be close to zero. He does cite a study that “finds that when low-skilled immigrants enter a metro area,” college-educated professional women work more hours and earn more money because they can hire housekeepers and babysitters. But he does not pull the trigger and advocate letting more low-skilled workers in. Indeed, to the extent he discusses skills and immigration, it is to advocate that we get “as many smart, skilled immigrants to our shores as we possibly can.” That is a good idea, but the U.S. government should let in many more unskilled people too.

Least is best: Yglesias’s other proposal to get more American children is to impose mandatory parental leave on employers. His case for this is amazingly weak. He gives two arguments. First, other rich countries do it and therefore we should too. Second, he writes, “If we believe at all in the idea that having and raising children is a valuable activity, then mandating some kind of decent minimum of paid leave is literally the least we could do.” Really? The fact that something is valuable means that government should use force to get more of it? And of course, it is not the literal least we could do: we’re showing now, and even he admits, that the least we could do is have no mandate. He clearly means the least we should do.

But why? Yglesias does not say. He admits that the mandate would “impose costs on businesses and nonparents.” But he misses an important group that would bear much of the cost: parents. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, made famous by some of his controversial statements in the lead-up to the Affordable Care Act, did some of the early work showing that mandating benefits for a portion of the work force will drive down the wages of that portion relative to the wages of others. The particular mandate Gruber studied was pregnancy coverage. He found that requiring employers to cover pregnancy caused the wages of women of child-bearing age to rise less rapidly than the wages of women outside that range. Similarly, mandating parental leave could well reduce wages for people who take advantage of it, mainly women, relative to wages of those less likely to do so.

It’s troubling that Yglesias seems unaware of this finding. It’s also troubling that he has little tolerance for people with different views on the issue from his. Fortunately, in other areas he shows more tolerance. In his excellent chapter on housing, he advocates getting rid of regulations on building houses — especially apartment blocks — in desirable cities. In arguing for more apartments, he says that allowing people to buy what they want is “the beauty of American freedom.” He adds that “individual situations vary, preferences differ, and sometimes people need to make trade-offs.” And in case his readers missed the point, he elaborates: “The point is that just because something is desirable doesn’t mean it makes sense to require it — a concept American policy makers have little trouble grasping in almost any context other than housing.” Unfortunately, among those who don’t grasp this — in the parental leave context noted above — is Matt Yglesias.

Transportation: One of the book’s best chapters is on transportation. In it, Yglesias makes a nice case for one of economists’ favorite solutions for the large amount of time Americans waste in traffic jams: congestion pricing. The idea is to charge more for using the roads at peak usage times. He points out that one reason congestion pricing works is that “it can operate through so many different channels.” Some people will not make the trip, others will delay or accelerate their travel plans so as to be on the road at lower-priced, less-congested times, and some will carpool or use buses, trains, or bicycles. As economists love to say, people adjust on many margins. The result, notes Yglesias, is that traffic congestion can fall substantially without much drop in overall traffic volume.

He points out that the resulting revenue need not be used to subsidize mass transit because congestion pricing will, in itself, help mass transit. As noted above, some people will switch to buses and, with less traffic on the road at peak times, buses will move faster. As a bonus in the chapter, he delves into why it is so expensive in the United States, relative to other rich countries, to dig subway tunnels. He admits that he does not have a complete answer for this, but he notes that among the factors contributing to the disparity are union work rules, featherbedding, and more elaborate station design choices.

Yglesias ends by advocating that we “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to posterity.” Amen. It would be nice to secure them for a few hundred million immigrants also. I immigrated in 1977. Others should be allowed to do so.