The book is largely concerned with domestic policy threads, though he contends that they do not fit together seamlessly unless and until we look at them from a foreign policy perspective, specifically, one of great power competition. His basic premise is that the US can sustain many more people than it currently does, with negligible impact on the environment that this is something we ought to do for reasons that are in our national interest (competition with China) and that in order to achieve this, we need to pursue an agenda of deregulation (upzoning, deregulating childcare), more immigration (both skilled and unskilled), and expanding the welfare state (paid family leave, year-round public schooling, better and more expansive healthcare, free childcare, etc.), while borrowing and raising taxes to pay for it.
This is the backdrop against which Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias argues that we must become bigger if we are to become richer, in One Billion Americans: The Case f or Thinking Bigger.
At the time of writing, the Trump administration has just proposed even greater restrictions on H-1B visas, while many on the Left support policies that are similarly skeptical of a bigger, denser America. Americans are fleeing dense urban cores for the supposed safety of the suburbs to ride out the pandemic immigration that had already slowed under the Trump administration has temporarily come to a standstill.
The fall of 2020 is not an auspicious time to argue that America is not crowded enough.
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