YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Yglesias

lines on the record: 73
first: 2020-09-09
most recent: 2020-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“If you told me for mysterious reasons, church attendance is going to start going up back again over the next 30, 40 years, I would consider that to be a very optimistic forecast for America. I think good secondary things would follow from that. I think community institutions are important and in a practical sense, religious ones are what seems to really work for people. When I hear people say, oh, you know, this new anti-racism on the left, that's like a new religion. I don't know that that's 100% accurate. I mean, I think there's something to that and there's also ways in which it's not true. But if it was like really literally true, like this is a new religion where people are going to get together like once a week and they're going to know each other and they're going to have a higher value system that motivates them.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if I could be like full Straussian and you. Well, no, I don't really know how to do it, right? Like if I put in my book”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Care about the impact on their relative standard of living of these things. And so I think a program that gives people child allowance type money or that organizes after school activities for people in a plausible way does have an impact, you know, not on Mark Zuckerberg, because obviously billionaires don't have a lot of limits on their consumption of things, but it's kind of like middle class professionals who live in Northern Virginia, like they do, right? Even though they're comfortable, economically comfortable people, their consumption possibilities are still constrained in meaningful ways and how we structure incentives, what we subsidize, what we don't subsidize makes a difference to what people do.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, sure. Okay. Yes. It doesn't have to be genetic. It could be a pure cultural inheritance. You know, that's interesting. I don't think it's a big issue necessarily. I don't think that the gaps in numbers that we're talking about are all that enormous. I also think that a lot of the way society is structured disincentivizes educated professional people from having a second or third child, even though it's not that the objective financial cost of doing it is so high, but that it's like, you know, you think about like Democratic Party micro-targeting of everything. And they'll say, well, okay, you know, if this little extra boost will help lift some people over the poverty line, like we should do that. But if you're making $140,000 a year, you don't quote unquote need help with your childcare costs. That's how the people in the think tanks thing.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of achieve their aspirations. Of course, sometimes people's aspirations are wildly unrealistic or they're incompatible with each other or something like that. But I think we know that a world in which most people have two or three children instead of one or two children is like a perfectly plausible scenario. That's not like I wish I had a flying car, right? Like we can do it.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean, I think that's a serious possibility, you know, and we can sort of people can disagree as to exactly how dire is that. I mean, Japan continues to function as Dean Baker would tell you. They're doing okay by some means. I think that's a sad outcome. I mean, in part for sort of vague Derek Parfit type reasons, but also in terms of growth and dynamism, I think that, you know, it's important that people, you know, be able to have families. And I was struck. I mean, my thinking evolved a lot when Lyman Stone and others pointed out that people were saying in America that they still wanted to have the like classic 2.5 kids on average. And they just weren't the number of children they were having was slipping to more like 1.8, more like 1.7 now. You know, and that's sad, right? When people can't sort.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You wrote some time ago, I think, in response to Brian Kaplan, that it's like, look, if you care about immigration and you care about people's ability to move, let's maybe chill with the open borders talk. Because if you're going to hit a hard political constraint and the country's going to lock down. And we've seen something like that dynamic in the United States. We've seen it in a lot of countries. And so managing people's level of tolerance for social and demographic change, particularly with foreigners coming in, you know, is an important political concept. That's where you need, I don't know what you would call it, wise political leadership and not just like strident analytically correct abstract people.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's interesting. You know, I mean, I don't know that it's clearly true that population growth would pour into a place like New York. I mean, some people would, right? But we have seen incredibly dynamic growth in our Sunbelt metro areas, which are, you know, sort of unfashionable in various ways, but people are doing very well for themselves in Atlanta and Dallas and Houston in the smaller ones, Nashville, San Antonio, where I spend a lot of time for family reasons. They've become incredibly international just because America is a good place to live. Chicago, which has a lot of those sort of New York-y qualities, but is much cheaper, you know, has been losing people, which is its own kind of governance type problems. But I feel like there's sort of plenty of space for folks. You know, the interesting political constraint obviously is on immigration, right? I mean, I remember.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, yes, if we're talking about the political constraint, then obviously it's a much lower bound than that. New York has a lot of governance problems. And, you know, they're going to take a short term, I think, fiscal hit from the pandemic. But a question for any political entity is like, how do you handle a short-term fiscal hit? Do you able to ride it out and kind of rebound in a strong way? Or do you totally wind up running the car into the ditch? And I don't have incredible levels of confidence that New York's political authorities can avoid the run into the ditch scenario. You know, I just think that in the abstract, the ability of an urban area to keep growing is bounded by governance issues rather than by the sort of fundamentals of space or congestion per se.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keeps adding them. And there's no spot at which, because they don't have the political constraint that New York or the Bay Area has. And there's no spot at which Japanese people want to stop clustering in the Greater Tokyo area.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. I think probably really, really big. It depends, obviously, on their infrastructure issues. But the case of Japan, right, which is a big country, but not nearly as big as current US to say nothing of a billion people US. That's a really big city, much bigger on a metro area basis than New York. And it keeps growing, even though Japan's overall population has stagnated or shrunk. And that's because they have a different land use regulation paradigm there that makes it much easier to keep adding houses to Tokyo. And I read, I think I read in some books somewhere that, you know, in urban growth, you benefit agglomeration benefits with congestion costs, which makes sense, right? I mean, you could draw a good chart like that. But in Tokyo, it never seems to happen, right? There's like plenty of other places to go in Japan, but they keep losing people.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From Dublin to Galway. Like, I could not help but be struck by, like, it's like, where is everybody here? Like, couldn't we do more? And Dublin is this really exciting international city. You know, I went looking for somebody told me there was like a good Indian restaurant somewhere. And then the staff there was like, oh, it's going to be very spicy. And I was like, no, no, no, it's okay. I'm not Irish. But I saw, I was like, there was an Amazon office near there and they had their, you know, some foreign engineers looked like from South Asia. And they were eating in there. And I thought, okay, that's good. That's okay. I can trust these guys. But it's not the tradition, you know, of Ireland. So it's a tougher political conversation. But I do think that's a society that you see changing to be more cosmopolitan, more diverse. And that will ultimately help power them through to the next level.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it would be interesting, right? You know, the EU has had a lot of problems. I think we've all heard. But, you know, on some level, if this project continues and they develop more of a European identity, like that would be a diverse identity, right? If you look at their little Euro notes and they're trying to abstract away to like styles of bridges and instead of national heroes, then that becomes a more accessible identity, right? I mean, conceivably it's easier for an immigrant to become quote unquote European than to become specifically Austrian in some way. And there could be a lot of benefits to that. I went to Ireland was the sort of last international trip I took. And it's a beautiful country, very successful in a lot of ways. But obviously a really empty country. You know, if you're working on a book about a billion Americans while going across”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the idea of trying to turn the United States into a giant Denmark, where it's like People are reasonably affluent, but there's no really big deal things happening here, like some guy who makes windmills. To me, that doesn't make sense, right? The United States is a big place, right? It's been a big place for a long time. It's a diverse place. It's a place that cares about its power on the national scale. I mean, I think to your inequality point, like that means it's going to be a relatively unequal place compared to some other kinds of countries.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I'm not a super Zionist person, but I'm Jewish, secular. I have some critiques of Israeli policy, but fundamentally to me, the idea of there being a Jewish state is not crazy. Just like there's a Danish state and there's a Finnish state. And you got to do things there and it wouldn't be that if you had flood of immigration. Similarly, economically, Denmark's nice. It's a nice place. Danish people like it that way. I think that's fine, good for them. America is a big, diverse country whose strength, I think, has always had a lot to do with scale. And it doesn't make, it makes a lot of sense, I think, for us to see some positive lessons learned from Sweden in terms of ways you can be more humane and still be a dynamic. We have big startups, things like that here.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd rather be Sweden too. I mean, I think it's fine if Denmark is Denmark. You know, one of the themes of this book, right, is it's about America, right? Like this is not a book about all countries everywhere and what everyone should do. There's people, there's like anti-Semites troll me on my email all the time by saying, where's your support for diversity for Israel?”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think even if you did, you wouldn't eliminate all of the political inequality that worries people, right? That you see, you know, this thing in California, right, where they're trying to regulate Uber and Lyft more strictly. And so now the companies are saying, well, we're going to shut down there. And left-wing people are now mad at them. But if you run a significant business enterprise, like you're going to be a powerful person in society, whatever your personal income is because it matters what these big businesses do. And I don't think that there's ever been a country that doesn't have that feature, right? I mean, as long as you have big successful businesses, the people who run them are going to be more politically powerful than, I don't know, the man on the street. And that's just life.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I don't know exactly where the lines curve on that. I mean, I'm impressed as I think, you know, a lot of people who are not hardcore anti-inequality folks that, you know, Sweden has a high number of billionaires per capita, despite a lot of social democratic policies. And the reason for that fundamentally is that there are successful companies that were founded by Swedish people. And that's good, right? If you're on the other side of it and you're trying to make the case for Sweden, you're trying to say universal healthcare is good. It's great that they have all these trains in Stockholm. You'd say like, look, this is a successful country, right? Like it's high GDP per capita. They've got IKEA. They've got Spotify. But that's also why they have some of that very high end inequality. And can you like balance that out in some Genie coefficient-y way? Maybe yes, maybe no.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think if we had a burst of good luck on the nuclear front, or maybe it's purely policy, I'm not that well versed in the nuclear universe and the arguments that people have there. But I think it's definitely true that if we had a breakthrough there that could get us the kind of clean, abundant power that was hoped for in the original post-war nuclear years and that the micro reactor people are very enthusiastic about, I mean, that would put us even more clearly in an increasing returns to scale world.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Energy has driven a lot in this sort of macro picture. And I think the news from the latter quarter, whatever it is of the 20th century on that front was just sort of very disappointing, notwithstanding other things that might power growth forward.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see, yeah. So, you know, I do think on some level, right? Some of the deep structures of economic growth do have to do with our basic ability to exploit natural resources, right? I mean, I say in the book, it's like we're not all farmers here who need to worry about we're running out of wheat fields. But when you look at the sort of big long-term trend, right? industrial revolution take off and kind of slow down in post-war years that has to have something to do with the technology of energy exploitation on a pretty fundamental level. And, you know, that is an area where I don't think you see necessarily those same clear returns to scale. We've had, you know, some big advances in fracking, some promising advances in solar power, some other kinds of things like that. But the kind of fundamentals of how we produce and use”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calm and quiet and things like that. And, you know, I mean, obviously everybody knows that. But I do think, you know, on an analytical level that you see tremendous rewards to sort of big scale things. I remember thinking I was working on this book at an early time and I was in Midtown Manhattan where even New Yorkers don't go because it's so terrible. And it's full of people, right? Like I think full of people who would tell you nobody likes going to Midtown Manhattan. And there must be some reason for that. Now, obviously, we're all doing everything on Zoom right now and those kind of effects have gone away. But it's not like we didn't have telephones 18 months ago or no ability to do these kind of things remotely. People were drawn to each other for whatever reason.”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's a little bit tension with my personal preferences. People will sometimes say to me, you know, well, it's easy for you to say this stuff. You like live in this big city, you know, blah, blah, blah. But I happen to have grown up in Manhattan, the densest place in the United States by far. I don't like it there that much. I've moved to smaller scale place. I like it better. Anytime I visit a small town, I kind of think, I kind of like this. I'm not like personally that into big crowds and huge things like that. I remember I went to Hong Kong one time and I felt like I was like the universe was having revenge on me for having done all these pro-density takes as I felt like incredibly overwhelmed by these huge buildings everywhere. So like I genuinely do sympathize with the view that there's something nice about”
2020-09-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source