Matthew Iglesias (7:29)

Glad to be here. How's it going?

Coleman Hughes (7:30)

Good, good. It's a pleasure to finally meet you virtually. I've been reading you for a long time, since before you had a substack, back when you were a co founder of vox.

Matthew Iglesias (7:40)

Yeah.

Coleman Hughes (7:41)

So there's a lot I want to talk to you about. And you know, you're one of these people that has an informed take on like 50 different really interesting issues. So it's sort of like podcast host, dream of a guest, because there's so many different things to talk about, or a nightmare.

Matthew Iglesias (7:59)

We'll see how informed any of it is.

Coleman Hughes (8:00)

So I guess one thing to talk about, and this is you're also a guest that needs very little introduction. But one thing to talk about that I think a lot of my listeners would be interested in, is sort of your move from VOX to Substack and how it tracks a sort of broader development and people moving away from mainstream media outlets, citing some of the dysfunction at places like Vox and the New York Times, among many others, and sort of seeking to have a more independent voice and there being a huge market for people like yourself who have independent voices to write on Substack rather than at places like the Atlantic, the New Yorker, so forth. So sure, you've talked about this a lot and you've written about it a little bit, but how do you view the departure in terms of all of these really interesting writers like yourself, moving away from mainstream media towards Substack?

Matthew Iglesias (8:54)

Well, you know, I mean, I could talk about myself and I can. I could talk about the industry, which is a little bit of a different question. But you know, I was one of the co founders of Vox back in 2014, launched the site with Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell. We had a lot of high hopes, grand aspirations, big ideas. One of the ideas that we had was that me and Ezra would be good at managing a journalism enterprise because we were good at writing Internet Content.

Coleman Hughes (9:26)

And I think I see an obvious flaw with that.

Matthew Iglesias (9:29)

Yeah. So first I and then later Ezra both decided that that wasn't really something that we were good at or something that we wanted to be doing. And I stepped back to a role where I was hosting a podcast and I was writing pieces and that was great. That's work that I really like to do. I also like to tweet a lot. I'm a outspoken, high volume person. I don't shy away from controversy, things like that. There was a sentiment at the company that as a co founder, to some extent anything that I said or did sort of spoke for the institution or was seen as speaking for the institution and that I should be mindful of what everybody there thought and so on and so forth. I didn't really agree with that idea. I didn't accept that premise. But I realized at a certain point there was no sense in just like endlessly fighting about it. You know what I mean? Like, was it like really true that I had an institutional voice and I owed it to everybody else on the staff to not be contentious? It was like I just, if that's how they saw it, like that was fine, but like I didn't need to be working there personally, you know, I've really wanted to be a writer. And also a huge share of the people who had been on the original team at Vox, plus some other subsequent hires, wound up moving on largely to the New York Times. I mean, Max Fisher, Amanda Taub, Eleanor Barkhorn, Brad Plumer, I'm losing the names. Ezra Klein, my co host on the Weeds, Jamie Koston, all sort of elevated up there to the big time, which is great for them. But it meant that Vox, you know, while it's a successful enterprise and ongoing, was not going to be the like news industry disruptor of her dreams. So I'd always liked blogging. That was how I got my start. I liked doing my own thing. It seemed like there were big opportunities on Substack for somebody who is good at the things that I'm good at. So, you know, I chose to kind of go there. Now, you know, is that the long run of media? I'm not really sure. I think in the industry there is not enough differentiation across the publications. I mean, my just standpoint as a reader is that Vox and Slate and the Atlantic and buzzfeed and a bunch of Vice digital media properties are too similar to each other that they have a similar sensibility. And then that sensibility is also similar to the New York Times sensibility and that. That doesn't make a lot of sense, you know, that you ought to have publications that are more distinctive from one another. And what we have right now is we have some publications that are conservative, you know, which is reasonable. And we've always had sort of like small conservative magazines. I wish that we saw, like, a big media enterprise that was conservative but journalistic in nature, you know, with like, reporting and stuff like that that competed in some ways, head to head with the times. And I wish that we saw the smaller digital native publications differentiate more from one another.

Coleman Hughes (12:42)

Is the Wall Street Journal not that.

Matthew Iglesias (12:44)

To an extent, maybe the Wall Street Journal is. I mean, it's a good newspaper, but I think conservatives don't see it as being as conservative as they would like it to be. I mean, I feel like conservatives raise a lot of complaints, complaints about the media. And I agree with some of their complaints. I don't agree with all of them. But ultimately what frustrates me about that discourse is it's like, show me. In Fox News, they have shown you can make a conservative cable news channel that's incredibly successful. But cable news, with all respect to my friends who work in the industry, is a kind of crappy medium. It's like there's just not a lot of information on cable news. It's like guys up there yakking and so, you know, like, do the work. Like, there are a lot of conservative people in the United States and you can serve that audience.

Coleman Hughes (13:36)

Yeah, totally. I think there is a larger dynamic between the right and the left, which is that the left controls a lot of institutions and has a lot of big ideas. You know, whatever you want to say about those ideas is a separate question. But the right, there's an abundance of criticism of institutions and big ideas on the left, and much of that criticism is valid, but it's less often that there is an equally big idea, you know, offered as an alternative or the same degree of successful institution building. And the newspaper example that you give is, I think, just one example of that dynamic that I think I'm seeing in a lot of different sectors.

Matthew Iglesias (14:21)

Well, yeah, I mean, so we have this polarization in the country, you know, I mean, both in terms of parties disagreeing, but in terms of demographic groups. Right. So younger people, college graduates, people live in cities going to the left, and older people, working class people, people live in rural areas going to the right. And in the political domain, that's given Republicans an incredible advantage because the Senate and to an extent, the Electoral College give extra weight to those conservative leading demographic groups so Donald Trump can get elected president while more people vote for Hillary Clinton in 2018. Republicans do terribly. They actually gain Senate seats because they're so strong in the rural areas. But so much stuff in life is done by working age college graduates. You're not going to build a media startup based on working class retired people. It just doesn't, it's like nothing against them, it's just like that's not who does things, it's not who runs institutions. And I think it's a pretty unhealthy place that the country's gotten in on both ends. I mean, I think progressive people feel their aspirations in democratic politics are being spoiled through unfair means. And I think that conservative people feel that, look, you know, I just want to get medical advice from the American Medical Association. I don't want them to have a like heavily ideological, you know, guide to addressing inequities in medicine. Right. That I just want institutions to function in their professional capacity. But they don't. I mean they institutions these days, they tend to lean left in their management because that's who manages institutions, institutions. And it's creating a lot of distrust, it's creating a lot of dysfunction, it's creating a lot of frustration for both groups of people. But it's not obvious to me what we do about it.

Coleman Hughes (16:20)

Yeah, it's not obvious to me either. It scares me that we are more and more entering a situation where everyone feels like a victim group and has legitimate grievances to point to and sort of focus on. So as you pointed out, the left can genuinely point out the fact that my vote in a very real sense is worth less than the vote of someone in a rural region, conservative in a rural region. That violates my sense of justice and fairness. And then on the flip side, people on the right can point out the fact that when they turn on the TV to anything other than Fox or try to just sample the mainstream media landscape, everything has a left wing skew. And they can understandably feel like the culture is just totally captured by the left in some ways.

Matthew Iglesias (17:12)

Well, and I also think that there's, I mean America has now a kind of, I don't want to exaggerate, but like a somewhat shared culture of valorizing victimization in a weird way, you know, you're pretty young, but if you go back to, you know, 20 years ago, I think that conservatives critique of the left, a part of it was that there was too much sort of emphasis on victimization and oh, woe is me and sort of External locus of control. And people need to take responsibility for their lives and do the best they can with what they have offered to them. And part of the Trump turn in Republican Party politics has been taking up that kind of same flag of like persecution and helplessness, but by different and wider groups of people, right? So now like it's immigrants fault if my, I don't have the job that I want, right. Or like that, like trade is bad and you know, like the Chinese are pulling a fast one on us and that kind of grievance politics. But coming from non college educated white people in the Midwest as opposed to, you know, low income African American people and it's I think like not super healthy. It doesn't, it's true, right? Like none of us are like the authors of our own destiny, right? We are all beneficiaries and victims of circumstance to varying degrees. Things happen. You can't fully control anything in life. But it doesn't make people happier or better off to dwell on the ways in which they've been wronged or something that happened to them that they can't control. Like as a giving advice to any human being, like you want to focus on the things that you can control, right? And like try to do your best. Like you will be better off that way, you will be happier that way. Trying to cultivate a sense of gratitude for what you do, have a sense of accountability for what's gone missing. And those are like really classic conservative ideas, but they've now just become across the board, I think, unfashionable in favor of everybody, not even so much whining, but like being told by other people that like nothing is your fault, everyone is out to get you. It seems like a good way to cultivate an audience, but it's just not great.

Coleman Hughes (19:48)

So what you're saying is the conservative idea of 30 years ago, the conservative critique of the left 30 years ago was true, but is now true of everyone?

Matthew Iglesias (19:56)

Yeah, something like that. I mean, I think it's gone pretty broad and there's not a lot of. But I mean just like a concrete example of that happening, right. It used to be that liberals would say, well you know, we could help people a lot if we had like better social problems, programs to give them money and things like that. And I think that that's true. But then conservatives would say, but you know what's also true is that people who are raised by single parents face a lot of disadvantages in life that are not remediable wholly through the welfare state. And that people need to exercise more responsibility in their lives and we should be supporting marriage and encouraging things like that. And that didn't really work like Bush era marriage promotion initiatives. Like, nothing came of that. And conservatives just kind of stopped talking about it at one point. But actually all that happened was that the demographic spread of unpartnered parenting got bigger and bigger. And so now it's like we just have lost out on, I think, a valid conservative insight, because it would be impolitic now that you can't just sort of cast the irresponsible people as this, like, other racial minority group. But these problems exist, very much so, in white communities. But conservatives don't want to talk about it anymore because it's not politically advantageous. Progressives don't want to talk about it because it was never the progressive view of these things. But we have, like, really serious problems, I think, in society that require some level of, like, community engagement and concern over and above the things that the left wants to do.

Coleman Hughes (21:43)

It's also hard to imagine Trump being the face of the pro marriage movement or the, or the pro family movement.

Matthew Iglesias (21:50)

Right. I mean, he would not be a credible messenger for something like that. Or you could say, look, he's so supportive of marriage that he's had three, you know, so you never know. But yeah, I mean, that's a kind of, it's a kind of decayed version of conservatism that Trump can represent, right, which is just this sort of. He's mad at the left, right? He calls out some excesses of the left. He embodies certain resentments that people on the right have, but he doesn't have, I think, a, like a constructive program. There's not a idea of conservative renewal that you can really identify with. Trump and a lot of things George W. Bush tried to do didn't work out. I think he was a quite bad president in a lot of ways. But there was an aspiration there, right, where you might think some of these were good ideas, some of them didn't work. Maybe we need some better ideas next time, something like that. But Trump, there's not a lot going on there.

Coleman Hughes (22:47)

I think the marriage issue is a good segue into your book, One Billion Americans. And I want to talk about this argument in some detail. I'll let you describe the detail. But the basic idea of this book is the US should try to stay number one on the global scene for various reasons. And one of the most important ways we have to do this is to increase our population so that we Are we remain the world's number one economy? And then you, you sort of go into the weeds, to quote your former podcast name, about how we would do this, you know, how we would increase the birth rate, how we would incentivize marriage, how we would change our immigration policy, how we would deal with the sort of rust belt cities that have been depopulating over the past 50 years. So just let's get basic with the fundamental premises here, and this may be a pointless question for some people, but why should America be the biggest economy in the world? Why do we have a morally valid case to want to remain number one?

Matthew Iglesias (23:59)

Here's the book, you know, for those on video. One billion Americans, we've got lots of little stars here. You know, I mean, there's, there's, I think, a lot of different ways that you can think about this. Fundamentally. I just kind of always took for granted in life that as an American, most Americans are proud. I mean, we're proud, you know, of our communities, of our lives, of things like that. But we're also proud of the fact that America has accomplished certain things in the world in a way that, say, New Zealand has not. Right? And New Zealand's great. It seems like a nice place. They're doing well. There's a million worse countries to live in than New Zealand. But the United States is a great nation in the way that I think we all understand. And you could say we send people to the moon. We intervene decisively in the Second World War. We held the torch for freedom during the Cold War. Right? Big things happen. The world looks to us and we look to ourselves to achieve greatness. Just during this pandemic, nobody is surprised that MRNA vaccines were developed largely in the United States and not in the Netherlands. And again, it's not because of anything wrong with the Netherlands. We're just like a big ass country.

Coleman Hughes (25:14)

If you have something against countries that start with N, I hate him.

Matthew Iglesias (25:17)

No. The other country that made a substantial contribution to vaccine research is Germany, which is another large country which has played a large role in world history, I think to more mixed results. But it's a big important country and I think that that is worth preserving just sort of on its own terms. In concrete terms, though, people of all stripes, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, they are very concerned about competition with China, and I think rightly so. China is a big important country, also has a quite bad regime. They're doing a lot of bad things. So why is China a big deal? Why do I take China competition seriously? Whereas if someone's like, oh, Matt, you gotta be terrified about Cuba, I'd say, no, you don't really need to be terrified about Cuba. I mean, it's a kind of bad regime there. But also, who cares? But we have to care about China because China is so freaking big. That's their biggest advantage in the geopolitical space. So then why does America matter more than Canada? It's because there's 10 times more Americans than there are Canadians. That's a great strength of ours that the leaders of this country in the 18th and 19th centuries deliberately cultivated a large population. They saw it as important. Important to bring people over from abroad, to get them settled on farms and things like that, and to create a powerful country. And I think that that's an idea that we drifted away from because we could take it for granted. But now that the birth rate has fallen a lot, that the level of immigration has fallen a lot, but the concerns about competition with China are at a higher level than ever. It was time to sort of affirmatively make the case for what had traditionally been our policy to encourage the growth of the population and the country.

Coleman Hughes (27:12)

And you basically rely on this logic of whatever the GDP per capita has to be multiplied by the population to get something like a comparison of how much power any two given economies have. So if we have one third the population of China, China may only need to get to one third of our GDP per capita in order to have the world's largest economy. And I know there's a. There's a. You go into the details of, you know, how we measure GDP per capita and all of that, but without getting too in the weeds, can you sort of defend that sort of logic of that sort of math?

Matthew Iglesias (27:52)

I mean, you know, look, obviously both things matter, right? In a lot of areas, it's the per capita that matters. So, you know, you look at Ireland, right, which is very high GDP per capita, very small population. That's important to know. I mean, the average Irish person is much better off than the average Chinese person. And you can see that if you visit Ireland versus you visit China, they got bigger houses, you know, more food, more cars. You know, life is good in Ireland. But when you're talking about big national projects, I mean, whether that's building aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles, whether it's traveling to space, whether it's financing crash programs to create vaccines, or whether it's throwing your weight around in commercial disputes, the aggregate size matters. And that's why we hear a lot about China doing these things. We Hear about the Chinese military, we hear about the Chinese vaccine development programs, we hear about China's nascent space efforts and we hear about China saying things, you know, it's, there's no movie where James Bond has to fight with Chinese spies. And that's because the movie studios need access to the Chinese market. And if they make a movie that China is mad about, they won't be able to show their movies in China. Right. And so that's why in the Marvel universe they took the Ancient One, this Doctor Strange side character who's Tibetan in the comics and is played by Tilda Swinton in the MCU movies. Because you can't have a Tibetan character in your things. You can't have a Chinese bad guy. And you know, is that the end of the world? No, you know, we're getting along, but it's not great. And you know, where does it go next? Right. When do we get to the point where they are saying to Disney, well, look, you know, if you want to show your Marvel movies in China, ABC News needs to not report on genocide against Uyghurs, needs to not show Taiwan as an independent country on a map. You know, you can take you to scary places. And that is the power of aggregation. So that, you know, if China can reach Bulgaria's level of economic development, they are a much larger economy than ours in the aggregate. And it's, it's something we should take seriously.

Coleman Hughes (30:07)

There may also be something to the fact that China doesn't actually. China has inherent advantages in this domain that aren't to do with population or gdp. Because the CCP can make decisions in a unilateral way, in a way that the American government, I think, can't. Just because the decision making apparatus is far more centralized in China because it's not a free country. Like, could the ruling party in America prevent Bollywood filmmakers from portraying Americans in a particular way? I mean, I'm not even sure who would be making that decision or how it would be made.

Matthew Iglesias (30:48)

But no, I mean, that's right. I mean also, I mean, we shouldn't be aiming to obtain the power to do censorship of foreign filmmakers. But what I do think we should be actually trying to do is push back against the Chinese censorship efforts. You know what I mean? I think, I don't know exactly what the precise right legislative mechanism is, but I think we ought to try to incentivize American based multinationals or just global ones to not give in to those kind of Chinese pressures. But to make that work, we, we need a market that other people want even more than they want the Chinese market. And, I mean, there are certain strengths to their system. There are also very real weaknesses to it. I think that we've seen increasingly that China made a lot of good decisions on economics about 10 to 15 years ago that were making them look really good. And they powered through the Great Recession with still tremendous growth. And people had a lot of concerns then about the viability of the Western model. More recently, I think Chinese decision making has started to look really shaky. And of course, in America, if the leaders make bad decisions, they get voted out of office, and they worry about that, and they try to do things that will make people happy or will deliver good results. Whereas in China, Xi has seemed, I think, increasingly questionable in terms of whether his ideas are working. But it's a dictatorship. He has an iron grip on power, and they can't get rid of him. So that's the weakness there. And I believe in America, it's like I want Americans to believe in ourselves, to see the virtues that this country has and the importance of building up more of it.

Coleman Hughes (32:43)

To what extent does the existence of Europe lessen our burden? The fact that Europe is a large economy that is, on balance, more aligned with our values than with China's, does that act as a kind of something in our favor in this international competition?

Matthew Iglesias (33:00)

It helps. I mean, Europe is there with values that are similar to ours. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, to an extent, India. I mean, the fact that there's this whole family of liberal, ish, democratic ish countries that are different from each other. We have different cultures, we have different institutions, but they are recognizable variations on a theme. I mean, that's good, right? I mean, there still is some sense of, like, a free world, you know, quote, unquote, that is out there and that I think I did not write a book about, like, diplomacy and how to think about the US India relationship, and a lot of that is outside my area of any kind of, like, real knowledge or expertise. But, you know, it's good, right? I mean, there is an embedded strength in democracy and freedom out there in the fact that, you know, these are things that appeal to a lot of people in a lot of different places that have delivered pretty good results for a lot of people in a lot of different places. So that's great. I mean, the world may get on without us, but I also just sort of wouldn't count on it. And I just. To me, that's not the American way. I don't think we want to just pass the torch to India the way the UK did to us at some point. Nothing against India, nothing against Indian people, but this is a really big, successful country, and I think we should be bigger and more successful.

Coleman Hughes (34:27)

Yeah, I think so too. I mean, it's not that America is perfect. It's a matter of what the actual alternatives are in the world. So I totally buy this premise. And it seems very healthy to have an increasing population and we'll get to immigration in a second. And I had Bryan Kaplan on to defend his open borders case a while back, and I found it all very compelling. But before we get to that, can we talk about the. The fact that birth rate is declining? This is a super interesting issue to me. And you know, I don't know if everyone is aware of the facts here, but pretty much with every passing year, the birth rate declines not only in this country, but in almost every. Every developing or, sorry, developed country. At least that. That I could. That I could Google in preparation for this conversation. So, deceptively simple question, I think. Why is the birth rate declining everywhere?

Matthew Iglesias (35:25)

Yeah, I mean, there's multiple reasons, right? I mean, people have become more secular. You know, there's more women's equality, there's more opportunities. I mean, there's a lot of things going on. But I think that if you think about raising family in economic terms, the economy grows over time, but relative prices change. If you compare 2022 to 1982, when I was 1 years old, in the 40 years that I've been alive, cars have gotten cheaper, televisions have gotten cheaper, computers have gotten way cheaper, certain kinds of entertainments have gotten. You wouldn't even say cheaper, but it's like we couldn't have imagined Spotify, right, in the 80s, like, what a bounty that is, or Netflix, HBO, Max. But other things that are labor intensive have gotten more expensive. And so that's childcare and healthcare and elder care and education. But it's also the time that you take, you know, actually like watching kids doing things like that. So I don't think it should be surprising to see that there is a kind of powerful secular trend across the world pushing people toward delayed childbirth, smaller families. I mean, I have one kid myself. I think it's like an appropriate kind of decision for us, for our family. It works well, but is it what we want out of society? Right. Like, the free market has a lot of virtues to recommend it. It's a great way to produce consumer goods in great quantity and have good customer service experiences and lots of other things like that. But what the market says is that we should be consuming less childcare, less education, less of things that. That take care of young people, and we should be consuming more streaming video content and podcasts instead. And I think we should ask ourselves, is that what we value as a society? Is that what we actually think the good life will look like is for us to have fewer and fewer people, but more and more access to streaming movies over time? And I tend to think no. And that there's a case for, you know, a really large investment in the things that support family life and child rear.

Coleman Hughes (37:57)

Yeah. So I think that too. But I feel I am. I'm skeptical of the prospects of really increasing the birth rate with. With policy, sort of for some of the reasons you highlighted. It seems like this trend, there's this sort of massive trend everywhere in the world where the opportunity cost of having a kid is rising. And it's rising, I think, because. Just because of the fact of economic growth, just all the ways in which today it's easier to buy interest, buy stuff, do stuff, connect with people that are interested in the stuff. I'm interested in first having the Internet and then social media and then having both of those things in your pocket. The extent to which that's made it so much easier to basically have a fun and exciting time on any given day of your life. And then compared to the experience of having a kid, which though it's, I imagine it's very joyous and exciting and I plan to do it myself, it's pretty much stayed the same over. And there are reasons it's sort of in principle going to stay the same because the amount of joy and excitement you get out of raising a kid is it's less vulnerable to change in the way that, like a childless adult life today is just like eons, just completely different than it was 50 years ago. Which means what you give up by having a kid just increases as life gets better and more interesting. And it seems like that would be a tough thing to reverse or substantially influence with policy. Right.

Matthew Iglesias (39:45)

I mean, I agree it's a big kind of trend. At the same time, like small differences make a difference. Right. So, you know, in the Czech Republic, they've gone from about 1.13 kids per woman to 1.71 over the past 15 years. Right. So that's an increase of about 0.6 children, which, you know, like, that's not a huge amount. Right. That's just eyeballing it. I don't think you would see like a dramatic difference in Czech society. It's a few more two child households rather than one. But it makes a big difference to the numbers over the longer term. You know, these kind of small changes compound over time. So I think we ought to give it a try. And you can look at numerical estimates. Lyman Stone from Senna's work for Institute for Family Studies has, I think the best work on estimated responsiveness of child rearing behavior to different kinds of policy changes. He mostly just looks at cash support for parents. And I think that something like the child allowance that Mitt Romney has proposed would plausibly take us from below replacement rate to above, not because it would make a huge difference in the number of children people have, but because we are close to the kind of line between a population that shrinks and a population that grows. And it'd be worth it to sort of try to go over. I started writing this book as one does. It takes a while before the pandemic, before the sort of inflation episode that we're in right now. So the text is very like, whatever, like, let's just spend the money, like, who cares? Whereas if I had to look at it now, I think you have to look closely at priorities and what's more important than what else. But I just would still make the case that, like, investing in children and the next generation is just one of the best things that you could possibly spend money on, spend resources on, and that we as a society don't allocate that much financial resources to supporting parents, particularly of young kids.

Coleman Hughes (41:59)

Right. And you also talk in the book about the way in which our social safety net contains marriage penalties, essentially. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Matthew Iglesias (42:09)

Sure. So, you know, if you want to help poor people, but you also don't want to spend too much money. Right. The best thing to do is target very narrowly and say, okay, in a static sense, which kinds of people really, really, really need the most help. When you craft a policy that does that, you tend to create a situation where in a lot of cases, the poorest families are ones that have one adult and one or more children because you have only one income and you're spreading it across multiple people. So if a poor person gets married to another person, their financial situation improves a lot. And so a natural way to design a program is to sort of target assistance toward those single parents and away from married couple families, which is fine if you're kind of looking at point in time. Right. That's the most efficient way to do it. But over the longer term, you're actually penalizing People, people for getting married. And that's not great. In particular, the way the Earned Income Tax Credit functions, plus some of the other programs, but especially EITC really means you'd be worse off as a low income person if you were married to the father of your children in the vast majority of cases. And of course people can have stable parenting relationships without being formally married. And there are some countries where that's quite common. But in practice in the United States, if you are actually married, that greatly increases the odds that a couple stays together. It increases the odds that they have additional children down the line. And it's very, I think it's pennywise but pound foolish to not spend the extra money it would take to let people sort of keep their help even if they become married.

Coleman Hughes (44:03)

My mom, who grew up in the South Bronx in a welfare heavy location, used to talk about how when the welfare auditor came around, people would hide their boyfriends or husbands so as to not make it look like there was a man in the house. This is an argument that Charles Murray fleshed out in one of his first big books called Losing Ground, where he argued that this effect, this marriage penalty, was so strong that it basically accounted for this steep decline in two parent homes in the black community. Especially, you know, you look at the numbers 1950, the marriage numbers in the black community look Fairly strong. By 1980, 1990, they look horrible. You know, it's a huge change. And Charles Murray said that this is, you know, this basically comes down to the government destroying the back black family with marriage penalties. And I've read this book and there's a certain kind of very clear and simple logic to it. The reason I'm sort of agnostic about whether it's true is because I'm not sure to what extent the decision to get married is truly mediated by these financial considerations. Obviously people respond to incentives, but not all kinds of decisions are really influenced by financial incentives of that kind. You know, I've heard of. So I'm curious what you think of that thesis and what you think of the link between these penalties and actual marriage numbers in general.

Matthew Iglesias (45:36)

I mean, I think in some ways the Losing Ground account was too. I don't know if you want to say it's too pessimistic or too optimistic, but the federal government tried to incorporate Murray's critique of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and like really scrapped that program. And it did not like substantially turn around the marriage numbers. So I somewhat doubt that it's true that that is like the proximate cause of the large decline. He also offered in that book a very sort of race centric view of this, which he then in his later books, I think really walks back because you start seeing greatly increased rates of unmarried parents in white communities. And that's coming apart, I think is about working class white people and very similar dynamics. It turns out to happen there. That being said, part of the issue is that we created, we designed earn a tax credit in this way to sort of replace old welfare or supplement it. And it has some kind of impact there. I don't really know how big of a deal this is quantitatively. It's true that people probably don't run the numbers in a super explicit way before deciding what it is they want to do. It's also true that when you have communities with high levels of poverty, large numbers of people accessing social assistance programs, there is ambient knowledge about how they function. People are smart. And particularly when a lot of people are similarly smart situated, they talk about what's going on. It's something that people know. But the biggest thing is that I don't think we really know how policies and norms kind of feed back into each other. Right. For the longest time, I think everybody had a sense that if you wanted to have kids, you had to get married first. It was just like that was social knowledge. And most people are just like a little bit conformist in their instincts. And if they see everybody doing something and everybody saying something and everybody acting in a certain way, that's what they also do. That norm has been very disrupted. It is not rare to have unmarried parents of either race. Any race in the United States at this point is a much more kind of acceptable option to people. And I don't think that like Dan Quayle going on television and being like, this is bad. That wasn't like a super effective intervention. In this kind of shifting landscape of norms, policy is what we've got to sort of try to work with. Also, I don't know, if anybody asks me, I would tell them like, yeah, you should do it, like get married, have a family, go for it. But I don't know how effective that is either. It's kind of hard to know where this stuff comes from or why.

Coleman Hughes (48:34)

So let's talk about immigration. This is.

Matthew Iglesias (48:37)

I love immigration.

Coleman Hughes (48:38)

I do too. I think, am I right that you're somewhat a product of immigration and your parents or grandparents?

Matthew Iglesias (48:45)

No, it's actually my family. No, I mean, so on my father's side, my family's from Cuba, but actually quite long Settled in the United States. So all my grandparents were born here, which I feel like by contemporary standards is like pretty. That's pretty long. I mean, my wife's family is like, you know, I did the Ancestry.com genealogy on them. You can find them coming over like the 17, whatever. So, you know, got nothing on the Crawfords, but there's a lot of people with more recent immigrant roots in the country. But, you know, I still think it's good.

Coleman Hughes (49:18)

Well, a lot of people disagree with that. And I think, you know, this. If we're going to increase our population, it seems like immigration may be the lever to pull that's even more powerful than trying to influence the native birth rate. Or at least I would say so. But let's just talk about some other reasons why people think immigration is bad. So one you deal with a lot in the book. And maybe you can tell the story of the Mariel boat lift here because I wasn't aware of this. And this is just one of those awesome natural experiments that just puts an empirical question to the test in a really useful way. But this is the idea that especially low skilled immigrants come to this country, they create competition for American born low skilled workers, high school dropouts or people without college, and they drive wages for American workers down. This is a, it's theoretically, it's a plausible concern just because of supply and demand. So why is this wrong?

Matthew Iglesias (50:20)

Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, so the empirical study you mentioned, this comes from Miami a while ago now. But you know, the United States used to have essentially open borders for Cubans. Kind of a special case of policy. But the Cuban government wouldn't let people leave, you know, and if you emigrated from Cuba to the United States, there would be consequences for your family, things like that. So not that many people actually came over. If you did, you'd be welcomed with open arms. But it was rare Then late in Jimmy Carter's presidency, Castro was having problems at home domestically and internationally. And he decided it would be kind of funny to stick it to the United States by just unloading like a huge number of people and just said like, fine, you want to go to Florida, like, get on a boat and go. And there's allegations. And I think it's true that he even to some extent, like took people from Cuban jails and was like, you're going to America. This is the story of Scarface, if you've ever seen that movie. But so this incredibly large influx of negatively selected Cubans shows up in Miami in a very, very rapid span. Of time.

Coleman Hughes (51:35)

150,000.

Matthew Iglesias (51:36)

Right. Something like that in an incredibly chaotic situation. I mean, not something that I would ever advocate that we do. Exactly. And so you're able to look at what was the impact of this on the economy in Miami, and there's really no negative impact. There's. George Borjas claims to show that wages for non Cuban Hispanic high school dropouts went down. Other researchers dispute that finding. But I think that what's really important is what an incredibly narrow finding that would be even if it was true. Right. I mean, non Cuban Hispanic high school.

Coleman Hughes (52:13)

Dropouts, didn't that amount to like 17.

Matthew Iglesias (52:15)

People or something like that? Yeah, I mean it was a tiny number of people in his sample, but it's also just not like a broad, you know, social crisis in America. So I mean, I don't think that we should like Mario boat lift ourselves into a billion Americans. But I think it goes to illustrate that the brass tax economic impact of immigration is just much more benign than people people fear. And the basic reason is that a human being is both supply and demand. So it comes and it's true. It's like you have more workers and there's somewhat more competition for jobs, but it's also somebody who buys goods and services and does things. And we see this when we look at the domestic case. I think it's actually not that controversial. You find any right wing popping politician from Texas and they will tell you about how fast Texas population is growing and they will tell you that like it's a good thing, you know, like they will tell you about how all these people are moving to Texas and how that's great. And it is great. And it's not the case that like you can't find a job in Texas because so many people are moving to Texas. If anything, it's the opposite, because business owners have confidence that the population is growing. They are always building lots of houses, they're building new malls, they're building new car dealerships. If you are the assistant manager someplace and you're doing a good job, you're going to have a chance to go be the manager of a new store because a new store is going to open. If you don't have growth, you don't have those kind of opportunities for people to move up into new slots. Instead we're all sitting around, we're waiting for the other guy to die or something. That's grim. And it's actually a growing pyramid is very beneficial to lots and lots of people.

Coleman Hughes (53:57)

Yeah. And what's I guess the interesting headline about the Mariel boatlift example is that if it were at all true or at all a really valid concern that low skill immigration is going to depress native wages, it should have been clearly true. In an instance like this where you had 150,000 people coming to one city in a matter of months that weren't selected for skill. Right. Just like a crazy influx, an influx that is so much higher than what any of our sort of typical immigration policies would be. It should have been an obvious signal here, and it arguably wasn't any signal at all.

Matthew Iglesias (54:35)

Right. And that's on the economics. Now, if you talk about other concerns people have, obviously, if you've ever been to Miami, it is quite different culturally from most American cities. And it's specifically different in that there's a ton of people from Cuba and then to an extent, Haiti, Puerto Rico there. Right. And so that's correct. Right. If the volume of people from Cuba who have moved to Miami over the years, moved to Boise, Boise would become quite different from how it is right now. And people could yell at each other as to what's better. But tastes are allowed to differ. I mean, I grew up in New York, so to me, that kind of diversity and whatever is great. I think Miami's really fun. I would be a little bored living in a very low immigration, very unhomogenous city with no interesting restaurants, things like that. But I think immigration skeptics get much too paranoid about the economic impact. And then I think that progressive minded people sometimes get too scoldy about people who just don't like, change or prefer their community to be a certain way. Because I disagree with that preference. But I hesitate to sort of like, moralize it too much. You know, if you're somebody who just like, likes places that stay the same. I don't know, like, I, like, I disagree, but like, who's to say, right? And I think if we could have like an honest expression of that idea, we could then try to. To work with it and to come up with something that works with everyone and that everyone can live with.

Coleman Hughes (56:18)

Yeah, I think this is the crux of the issue, you know, because when I go to Miami, I think it's awesome and it's actually, I have to do a lot of work empathetically to put. To try to put myself in the shoes of someone who comes to Miami and has an aversive reaction to it and thinks, this is not what I'm used to. This is not the America that I like. I don't Want more of the country looking like this. I actually have to work very hard to even understand how someone could have that reaction. But I'm also aware that that's conditioned by my background. Like my half, my family is Spanish speaking. I grew up hearing Spanish eating Puerto Rican food all the time. So Cuban culture feels closer to home for me. It feels as close to home for me almost as a sort of American, English speaking culture. Not quite, but certainly much closer than someone, than it does for a lot of Americans. And given a different background, I would totally have those same feelings of discomfort. And no doubt I have feelings of discomfort about things that are unfamiliar to me. And so I guess there's two different points. One is that I would hate for anyone to be called a racist on account of having the kinds of cultural discomforts that like the vast majority of people everywhere have. At the same time, I wouldn't want to respect someone's feeling of discomfort by enshrining that in policy when the US Stands to benefit so hugely from increasing the amount of people that we take in. This is also something, I mean, this is related to this sort of gentrification argument too, of this neighborhood is changing in ways that I don't like. But when you look at the details of gentrification, it tends to be a boon for those neighborhoods, even for people previously living there. It's like, okay, I get that you're uncomfortable, but that discomfort shouldn't necessarily rule the day in terms of policy.

Matthew Iglesias (58:18)

Right? I mean, I think that that's sort of the most important thing to say is that, like, look, it's fine to have whatever tastes you want, whatever preferences you want. I mean, I'm not here to judge exactly what people like in their neighborhood, in their town, and things like that. But where it's wrong is to delude yourself about what is going on in terms of facts and material realities. And long before I ever worked on immigration, I thought a lot about housing policy and neighborhood change type things. And a lot of times people will convince themselves that new construction in their neighborhood is harming them, and it's just not true. There's no way you could run the math. There's endless studies on this. No, if you just don't like the new buildings, you don't like how they look, you think they're tacky, you think people live in them who aren't like you, and you don't like them. You think that the mix of stores that's around changes to be less stores that you're interested in and more Stores that somebody else is interested in. I can't tell you that you're wrong. Everyone is entitled to think what they think about the aesthetics of the neighborhood. But you should understand factually what the economic impacts are because that influences your decision. I mean, we all have. I think national parks are great. I like visiting them. I wish we had more national parks. At the same time, if we took land that's being used for other things and put them into parks, like there would be a cost to that. And you have to actually look at it. Right. And you have to look at it with a realistic assessment, not just a totally kind of sentimental one. But the other thing that I think we should be trying to have is solutions of some kind. And you know, an idea that I got from an economist named Adam Ozemack worked, he did it for the Economic Innovation Group was to create kind of like local opt in immigration systems so that cities could say, yes, we would like more immigrants to come in and other communities could decide that they don't want that. Right. Instead of needing to say that, you know, on a national average, we need to make a collective decision that if, you know, the government in Buffalo, New York is like, we could really use more people here, people from around the world that they have the option to do that. Right. And if people in Iowa, like want to not have immigrants, they could have the option of not opting into something like that. And I think that both that might open up some more opportunities that aren't open right now. But I also think people would see in the longer run that communities that are open to change and open to people are going to do better than communities that stay closed off.

Coleman Hughes (61:09)

Yeah. There's this other concern with immigration that some people have, which is ultimately the direction of the country is determined by the values and beliefs of the citizenry, or at least to some extent in a democracy, you would hope that's true. So if you let in people that don't share sort of anything close to median American values, then it just changes the character of the country in the long run. So this is, you can think of thought experiments where you. I'm asking you whether you would want to let in 50 million people that have all of the values and belief profiles of Trump voters or all of the values and belief profiles of sort of the progressive hyper woke elite, right?

Matthew Iglesias (62:00)

Yeah. I mean, obviously only people who agree with me about everything should come. No, I mean, I think that that's a, you know, it's a serious question. And I think that something people ask me about sometimes like well would you give this same advice to every country? And I probably wouldn't. At any rate, if you look at a country like Finland, right. It's like it's right there in the name. This is like the land for Finns and it's a really small country, right. So if they want to say well look, if we let too many people in like our whole culture is going to be gone. I'm like eh, I don't know. That might be true. Right. The United States is different in that we have I think always had this kind of open access national culture. Joe Biden line was like America's an idea is something that he says the power of the American idea is that our great recent anti immigrant president was married to an immigrant. And that's something that's deep in America now. That being said, yes. I mean you would not want to have a huge quantity of immigration from one specific foreign country that would just kind of like swamp the existing culture. I think that our culture is very robust, very adaptable, that people from all over the world take to it and love it. But that that's why we want a sort of a diverse stream of immigrants from lots of different places. That's how the melting pot works, so to speak. Because America is big, people are small. I also think it's not crazy to ask for selectivity in terms of who immigrates. And I think if you want people who have high levels of education or specific labor market skills or if you want to prioritize an idea that I think is a little underrated, is maybe that we should prioritize immigration from other Anglophone countries, that there's a large number of Jamaican Americans and other people from the English speaking Caribbean have done very well here over the years. Up until 1965 there were totally open borders with those countries. With Hart Cellar we made it much more difficult for people from the Anglophone Caribbean to move here. And I think that was maybe a mistake, that that's a very similar culture to sort of American culture. And I hope that conservatives can see a little bit over the past couple of years that there's a kind of like an immigrant patriotism quality that I think conservatives have underrated as a potential asset and progressives have maybe also underrated, you know, like expecting foreign born people to buy into certain kinds of left wing anti patriotism in a way that doesn't really make sense. People who move here voluntarily from other countries are very aware that the United States is a good place to live all Things considered, despite its flaws, the immigrants who I know, they're not naive about problems in the United States of America, but they also came here for a reason. And that, that's something that is good and that I think strengthens things that a lot of conservatives care about.

Coleman Hughes (65:18)

And they also have at least one reference point for what another country is like. And to the extent that their origin country has, you know, the same problem on some shares, one of Americans, America's problems, they can generalize and see, okay, well, you know, maybe this is not an America specific problem. Maybe this is actually some flaw in human nature or maybe, you know, just to have one reference point, whereas there are a lot of Americans disproportionately on the left that don't have another reference point for what countries are like. So when something goes wrong in America, there's a reflex to say this, we must be doing something specially bad here, which is not necessarily true.

Matthew Iglesias (66:03)

I mean, it's, there's a kind of, I often think there's a kind of parochialism to some of the left wing racial discourse in the United States, which just doesn't contextualize any of the issues that we have on that front. They're quite real people aren't making things up, but they're also not unique to the United States in particular ways and they're not totally different. A different example of this that I think was funny is I remember I was in Jaffa in Israel one time, but in a largely Palestinian neighborhood community there. And the people there were offering complaints that are just identical in every way to the complaints that you hear about gentrification in a lot of American cities. Except they really strongly felt that this was a unique aspect of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. But they were just mad that yuppies are coming into condos and they have their dogs and they want to open yoga studios. And I was trying to say to them, it was like, there is a lot that's unique about this country and about the realms that are there. But what you are describing here is just what's happening in every American city. And it's nothing to do with the particulars of it. It's just what happens when the economics of cities change and when fashions kind of shift around. And I do think that foreign born people, they both have a different perspective and they bring that perspective to a community in which, you know, if you, if you talk to people from different countries around the world, you see what is unique about all of them, what different perspectives people have. But you also see like Things that, things that are the same, you know, and that there are aspects of prejudice and ethnic conflict and group prescription that just happen everywhere and that, you know, I think the people at our best try to transcend those things, but it's a struggle.

Coleman Hughes (67:56)

Yeah. And I guess finally, I think you make a point about immigration in the book, which is really good and not often made and potentially persuasive to people on the right that are anti immigration, which is without our history of being unusually open to immigration, we quite likely would have been overtaken by China already. Right. In terms of the, you know, being the world's largest economy. And I think this is totally true. I mean, like the, the idea that accepting immigrants is a favor to immigrants at our expense is just never how I viewed it. I mean, that could be true in the case of refugees that are, you know, impoverished and fleeing war and very poor. But in the general case, in the vast majority of cases, you know, immigration has been a major strategic benefit to the United States. It is, as you put it, it's a strategy for national greatness.

Matthew Iglesias (68:59)

Yeah, I mean, I think that that's, that's important. Right. I mean, there are huge benefits to immigrants of coming to the United States of America. But in the aggregate, there are also benefits to Americans of far and born people coming here. And it's a big source of our sort of greatness over the years. Abraham Lincoln, right after his reelection, you know, he delivers this message to Congress about his plans to win the Civil War, but also to, you know, build back better, to steal a phrase. And he says, you know, well, we're going to want to get more immigrants to come over here. And he's very worried, though, that there was a lot of sort of like a bad reputation about scams being run by the shipping lines over there. And so he wants Congress to appropriate money so that we can like tell people how to immigrate to the United States from Europe. And this is part of his agenda to rebuild the country is like, we're going to have more people here. George Washington, you know, going all the way back. The first president, he says, you know, that we want to sort of recruit people from around the world. During World War II, we got this amazing influx of Jewish scientists who were fleeing Nazi Germany and they helped us win that war. And then we got a secondary influx of non Jewish German scientists who were running away from communism and they provided more great sort of assets to the country. And most people are not contributing to humanity on Albert Einstein's level. But that's Fair enough. But anyone who is starting a business, anyone who has skills that are common in their home country but rare here, even anyone who is helping other families out by taking care of their kids or mowing their lawns or is helping us be a society that can do more. And it's true that it is helpful to the people who come, but it's also helpful to us. And we can tinker with the design of the tax code or the welfare state if we have super specific concerns about the impact of immigrants on Social Security, we can run the numbers and make sure we bias toward younger people, things like that. But we shouldn't see it as an act of charity. It's a national strategy. We should think about what we want the strategy to be. We can be selective about who comes, but. But I think that there's a big advantage to fairly large numbers of immigrants.

Coleman Hughes (71:35)

And all of this is. All of this, all of these ways of increasing the population are an alternative to population decline, which, as you note in the book, has been happening in major American cities like Detroit and St. Louis. And I had Shelby Steele on this podcast a while ago, who I was filming a documentary with in St. Louis at one point, and he took me down Martin Luther king Boulevard in St. Louis. And my memory of it might be just slightly exaggerated by how insane it felt to sort of drive down this boulevard that was just totally decaying and unpopulated and like every other building was, the windows were totally smashed. It was like I grew up seeing places in Newark that were like this, but not for two mile stretch, right. And it was just truly arresting. And I can't imagine growing up in a place where just everything around you is screaming of hopelessness. And so go ahead.

Matthew Iglesias (72:36)

Yeah, well, I mean, and it's not just the aesthetics, right? I mean, you imagine. So, okay, so you're growing up in St. Louis and say you avoid all the many problems that people who are growing up in St. Louis tend to have. And you know, you graduate high school, maybe you go to college, I mean, you're doing well and so you want to build a life for yourself. And well, are you going to do it there in St. Louis where stores are closing, where there's no demand for work, where there's no growth, there's no opportunities? No, of course not. It's like you're going to be like, this is great, I got out and so I'm going to leave. But then everyone is just even more left behind by the people who are doing best. Leaving the community versus San Antonio where my wife's parents live in the San Antonio area, so I've come to visit there. And it's at the other end of the spectrum where just, like, there's been so much growth that it's not that nobody who grows up in San Antonio ever leaves. But if you like it there, there's just clearly going to be opportunities. There's always somebody building more stuff to serve more San Antonians. And so you'll have a chance. You can sell things to the next guy, you can manage the next store, you can build the next apartment complex. You can do whatever you want. But once cities start shrinking and St. Louis is an outlier, I mean, St. Louis is the shrinkage capital of the United States, but there are so many communities, St. Louis and Detroit, but Cleveland, Akron, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Buffalo, all in New York. So many small cities in Pennsylvania, York, Erie, and they're shrinking. And it hurts the tax base, it hurts the job market. It makes them depressing, frankly. It makes people want to leave, which just accelerates the problems. It is so amazing. So I grew up in New York City. You grew up, I think, in New Jersey, across the river. And it's really cool that Newark and Jersey City and some of those other places pulled themselves out of that kind of spiral and that they're growing now. But because the media is so based in New York, I think a lot of people think that every place is having the kind of turnaround and gentrification sort of crisis that you see in Brooklyn or you see in Newark. But that's actually a very unusual story. Most of the cities in the Midwest and interior north of the United States just continue to be shrinking, just like they were in the 70s and 80s. And it's like. It's a real tragedy.

Coleman Hughes (75:16)

So if you could give my listeners with. Give my listeners sort of one message to go away with, whether that is to support a particular policy or to absorb a particular idea, what would it be?

Matthew Iglesias (75:32)

But the idea everyone needs to absorb is that they should buy the book. That's like. That's what we're here to do. I know. I mean, it's that we should believe in the goodness of America and we should believe in the greatness of America. And we should see that. That should make us aspire to have more Americans than we do now. I think there's a lot of room for reasonable disagreement about existence. Exactly what we'll get there. But I think this is a goal that a lot of people should be able to get on board with, with a lot of different kinds of values and that it's the antidote to some of this culture war politics of just people tearing each other down over fundamentally relatively minor differences in our lifestyles. There's a lot that we have in common as Americans, and we should share that with each other and we should share it with the world.

Coleman Hughes (76:19)

Well, that's a beautiful sentiment. The book is One Billion Americans. Matthew Iglesias, thanks so much for coming on my show.

Matthew Iglesias (76:26)

Thank you.

Coleman Hughes (76:31)

If you appreciate the work I do, the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website, ColemanHughes.org and to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you'll never miss my new content. As always, thanks for your support.