Proposal for how, over a period of years and decades, the USA will triple its head count. But it is not by any stretch an organized Hypothetically, allow for a denser country that permitted more immigration and Perfectly serviceable and unobjectionable policy ideas that would, Point of fact, this specific idea disappears for long stretches of the book. The nation’s population to match the rising Asian powers is something that is Pursue this “hideously immoral” policy aim. In which case we will stay number one,” although we should not deliberately Less poor and seem to be succeeding.” They may, of course, “stumble and fail, But “India and China are trying to become Remain much, much poorer than the United States. Yglesiasĭoes recognize that by any per capita measure, both of these mega-countries People will inevitably exceed our own (and China’s may already have). To note that the aggregate economic output of China’s and India’s billion-plus Why one billion? The author is surprisingly hazy on this point, except That there should be one billion Americans by some undefined point in theįuture. Of thoughts and proposals loosely arrayed around the endearingly crackpot idea Yglesias’s latest, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinkingīigger, is a near-perfect example of the genre-a book-length collection Loosely connected, lecture-circuit insights like guests at a party whereĮveryone seems to be the friend of someone else’s spouse, awkwardly unable toĮxplain why they’re all there together, sweating and drinking under the same Designed for an educated, business-classĪirport set who have heard of the Aspen Ideas Festival, they gather groups of

Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” diptych tend to collect a set of superficiallyĬounterintuitive arguments and insights that upon closer inspection almostĪlways resolve themselves into the preexisting, commonsense notions thatĪssumes to be true.

Reads, even when they number in the many hundreds of pages, volumes like David

But what does it mean when a columnist or a pundit writes “a book”? Swift A book? A novel, a biography, a popular science story-I think I know what theseĪre, even at the far edges of formal experimentation, where categories are

1 billion americans book