I’m Canadian that way: It’s more important to be good than to be Great. Nor am I convinced that a country needs to be No. I’m not persuaded that China’s and India’s huge populations are central to their economic success. “Rapid ongoing economic growth in India and especially China is leading to the relative decline of the United States of America as a great power and threatens to eclipse it as the world’s number one state in the not-too-distant future,” Mr. Therefore, it opens with a lot of stuff about the Need to Restore American Greatness. What I didn’t consider was that this is an American book – one being published before an election. Absolute population was less likely to be its main subject as the need for population density in the right places. It examined the crisis of housing affordability, accurately attributing it to restrictive policies that forbid multi-unit housing and thus force urban neighbourhoods into cripplingly low population densities (Canada has the same problem). But I had a clue to its more likely argument, since I’d enjoyed the author’s previous book, The Rent Is Too Damn High.
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