The author neglects entirely the fact that these city-states arose without any central plan to create these economic zones. They are the result of the market and political processes we already had in place. Did some technocrat wizard in Washington say, "We should target the Northeast Corridor to produce 20% of our GDP"? No. That result was organic.
Here's an alternate proposal: decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies. Reduce the federal take of taxes, leaving the money in the hands of the people who actually innovate, employ, and make economic decisions.
The primary fallacies in this central planner's thinking is that some new National Economic Planning Board will be a) completely altruistic in allocating a pile of cash to the places that will produce the most economic benefit, b) able to out-perform the decentralized economic decision-making mechanism of the market (prices), c) not be subject to the lobbying that so corrupts the Congress now.
Centralized planning worked for the Insterstate Highway System [1], which was considered successful.
If you parse responsibility down to the states, they're only going to build within their own self-interests, which is not very well aligned with inter-state travel. You'll get a hodgepodge of corridors, if the states even build at all.
For example, Kansas won't build a track from KC to Colorado's border. Instead, they'll route the track south through Wichita and other cities within their border. Or it will turn out like California's project [2]
inter-state travel is aligned with the self-interest of states that want to have robust economic interactions. Kansas won't built a line to Colorado's border on their own, but the two states might jointly connect KC, Wichita, and Denver, and Colorado Springs if they thought those connections would be mutually beneficial.
At the city/county level, Denver doesn't have its own mass transit system -- it cooperates with several surrounding counties to make up the "Regional Transportation District" which runs buses and light rail. This sort of regional organization doesn't somehow disappear when you make it multi-state instead of multi-city.
Right, but Kansas is a good example of how they will use their state-level control to route all inter-state travelers through each of their cities, increasing travel times and decreasing value.
The question isn't whether or not interstate travel is beneficial, it's how the states will use their self interest to diminish quality, effectively turning the project into a tragedy of the commons.
Kansas isn't a great example for this. Why was I-70 routed eight miles south of Manhattan? (You'll really wonder why if you need fuel somewhere in the 60 miles between Topeka and Junction City.)
Depending on my origin and destination on either side of this state (it has been less common for one of those to have been in Kansas), I have used several other highways to cross it, and I haven't found them to be slower than I-70.
Because the interstate system (I-70) was designed using central planning. Routing north through Manhattan would have made the highway longer, and thus less effective for interstate travel.
Are you really claiming the current route is a good thing? There is literally nothing in the 60 miles between Topeka and Fort Riley. The geography is a gently rolling plain, that favors no particular route over any other. Manhattan is the site of one of the two universities in Kansas of which anyone outside the state has ever heard. Passing through Manhattan would have added about five miles to the road, would have been an added convenience for tens of thousands of drivers every year, and would have saved the later cost of improvements to the various high-traffic roads linking Manhattan to the rest of the highway system. If this is the great work of "central planners", they can keep it.
I-80 does the same thing most of the way across Nebraska -- it goes through Omaha and Lincoln, and then it misses everything else by 3-5 miles. It creates this weird dichotomy in places like Lexington, where most of the town is far away, but there's a huge cluster of businesses being built next to the interstate. It's often not even a shorter route; compare I-80 to US-30 in that area.
There are a lot of things to love about the Interstate highway system, but it's not always the superior choice.
I haven't spent much time in Nebraska, but is it possible that Omaha and Lincoln were originally the same as the other places, and now they've just grown enough to fill in the gaps?
If all this hadn't happened so long ago, it would be interesting to see who owned land adjacent to the interstate exits when the interstates routes were decided.
In order for states to use their self-interest to diminish quality we have to ask "diminish relative to what"?
If your comparing the actual to some ideal then, of course, your always going to see a diminished quality. But that's just a tautology.
We have to ask ourselves does a particular plan work better or worse than some other realistic alternative.
Unfortunately, realistic alternatives almost always require trade offs with special interest groups. Sorry dude, that's just reality.
It's a simplistic analysis to compare something to an ideal optimum point and bemoan how far we've fallen from the ideal. But it's not terribly useful.
"We have to ask ourselves does a particular plan work better or worse than some other realistic alternative."
You're arguing about the highway system. Not only is it "a realistic alternative" to your state-run theory, it's actually real.
In fact, we've had this debate, in the real world, and your side lost: every state has an extensive network of state-funded highways, nearly all of which are slower and less efficient than the interstate system.
Limited access state highways are the same speed as interstate limited access highways ("freeways"). The feds dont give the states magic pixie dust when the states build and maintain the interstate freeways.
In CA, my understanding that the most used parts of interstate freeways are actually state limited access routes (highways) extended to major national cities. This is in addition to the other state routes (expressways, etc.) and other county routes that permeate pretty much everywhere. Together, this state highway system (the county being an administrative instrument of state government) is by far more efficient than e.g. taking an interstate to a major national city (skipping even large regional cities) and then off-roading everywhere else. "Efficiency" is pretty loose term in this respect, no?
You do know that roads crossed state borders before the interstate, right? In truth, for the traffic volume, they were pretty good.
That said the states would have evolved them to meet the needs, while the federal government took a more revolutionary approach. I tend to prefer the agility of incremental approaches. That said, when you are on the right side, revolutionary change is nice too. Despite how it seems today, I'm sure there are those that would argue the money could have been better spent. Ultimately, the question is where you put your faith; we the people or we the government?
Not at all. This intermodal project and many of the other federally funded ISTEA projects [1] work well at the state level because they supplement the existing interstate highway network.
On the other hand, the high speed rail corridors in the act (which was a new network altogether) failed horribly.
> Centralized planning worked for the Insterstate Highway System [1], which was considered successful.
Considered successful by some, perhaps, and probably not so much by others. Like people who don't like global warming or highway deaths, to give two examples.
I wonder if the passenger and freight rail lines the interstates helped kill were safer still and building the highways might have increased fatalities by switching from rail to driving despite being safer than the older US highways.
yeah,it was wonderful as long as it wasn't your neighborhood that got bulldozered. There are not that many functions which require that level of government. The Federal Government should insure States cooperate with each other, not hold States hostage to cooperate with the Federal government.
For as many benefits of the Federal Government it sure incurs a cost and penalty in many other areas. Federal rules and regulations drove health care costs up because it prevented sales across state lines. The Feds help cause if not were the main cause of water crisis in California by selling water so cheap that it exaggerated growth of water intensive businesses. It forces companies to see alternatives to sugar to protect a few business interest in limited states. The list can go on and on. Oh, it also lends aid to and gives court backing to search and seizure.
I am quite sure we can afford to live with a much more limited government
Whether the state or federal level government controls planning won't change the problem of displacement. Opining your views on small government makes it seem like you personally just don't want the rail, for which switching the project to state-level control is non-sequitur.
They gave him money, and he built highways with that money. Besides, NYC is far from the only place where this happened.
Look at St. Louis: rather than creating peripheral connections through then-undeveloped (not anymore!) land to the existing I-55 (which for miles runs along the Mississippi, completely avoiding the problems I cite), they routed not one, not two, but three different interstates (often less than a mile apart) through central neighborhoods (most often those of minorities), destroying the existing networks of travel, commerce, and community. For what? To save a longhaul trucker five minutes? Pull the other one; those truckers drive north or south of the city on 270 to avoid the mess of the Poplar St Bridge and East St Louis's mind-melting spaghetti junction, and they have for decades. The destruction of minority communities, and the poorer lives that minorities live in St. Louis today, was a feature, not a bug.
Why decentralize power back to the states? What is it about the states that make them the right level to delegate power to?
A large point of what I took from the article is that states are simultaneously too large (because they encompass metro areas and rural areas that often have little in common, both in terms of economic and social outlook) and too small (because they encourage race to the bottom competition between states who in many ways have common interests).
When you devolve power to a lower body, you are doing a form of central planning because you're determining what those lower bodies should be. So we should do it right. That might mean that states aren't the only body to consider.
>> They are the result of ... the political processes we already had in place
You can't assign this causality with certainty. They may have also arisen despite the political processes we have in place.
I agree that "decentralize back to states" is no solution. States have, for the most part, shown themselves to be poor stewards of power. Achieving the right balance of power at each level is the challenge.
No more than any other level of government left unchecked. The pendulum has now swung the other way, and there's probably an optimal Goldilocks zone somewhere in the middle. You're right that it's about balancing the authority of government at different levels against each other.
For one, the Constitution already has a legal framework for decentralization, and that is the states. Also, states already have governments etc, so from a pragmatic standpoint transferring power to them can potentially be done without setting up new centers of power that overlap existing structures. Unfortunately the Constitution prohibits breaking up states without their consent, so short of a Constitutional amendment it seems unlikely that these advantages could be obtained with entities smaller than the existing states.
I agree with your premise (I think); personally I prefer the ninth amendment to the tenth. Certainly however, I would favor d?evolving power to the states instead of pushing power up the totem pole through regionalism.
> When you devolve power to a lower body, you are doing a form of central planning because you're determining what those lower bodies should be. So wee should do it right. That might mean that states aren't the only body to consider.
In software development, we've moved power from a Big Design Up Front (aka waterfall) planned by a few to a series of teams, each with core specialties, areas of control, and many degrees of freedom but still have interfaces, agreements, and goals to tie them all together.
It's because we know that the waterfall process can't have all the information up front, can't see all the risks and opportunities, and can only be as good as the experience and foresight (sometimes guessing) of the few in charge who also happen to be the furthest from the problem.
Why is it bizarre to consider a similar approach to a much more complex system?
I don't think it is bizarre. What makes you think I do?
I agree that it's a great idea to delegate powers to lower bodies. But you have to decide what those lower bodies should be. I'm just arguing that the states (as currently formed and defined) might not be the best bodies.
And yet our most reliable systems are all effectively Big Design Up Front (aka waterfall).
And, in fact, the poster child for "agile" was the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation which was a gigantic FAILURE precisely because of all the complexity which "agile" never handled.
Complexity doesn't magically go away just because you break things into smaller pieces.
C3 was a failure for whom? All of the planners and senior engineers went on to spectacularly successful careers as Agile "thought leaders". Sounds like a rousing success to me. :D
I, too, find it funny that people whose main large-project experience is C3 use it as evidence that they should be trusted with anything.
> It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program — each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.
> The product is only as good as the plan for the product.
> Take the upgrade of the software ... a change that involves just 1.5% of the program, or 6,366 lines of code. The specs for that one change run 2,500 pages, a volume thicker than a phone book. The specs for the current program fill 30 volumes and run 40,000 pages.
> Don't just fix the mistakes — fix whatever permitted the mistake in the first place.
> Ten years ago the ... group was considered world-class. Since then, it has cut its own error rate by 90%.
Not every piece of software needs such an obsessive approach - but, there are pieces of software that absolutely do need such an obsessive approach!
In other words, there isn't a single binary correct answer for every choice. There are some things that are best decided at the neighborhood level, there are some things that are best decided at the global level, and there are are many things that are best decided at levels in between.
It seems to me a national approach, with significant input from the states, seems like a very appropriate level for something like an interstate road system. Particularly given our already successful history with the National Highway System [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System].
Why is it bizarre to consider an approach that is logical and has already been demonstrated to be effective?
Without the end-user involved in the entire development process, with no BA, it is still waterfall aka 'fake agile'. Creating a division in software development creates a gap. Shouldn't even be sitting in a separate office / section of office / in that state of mind.
It is not "in software development." It is product development.
This is a good analogy, but I think your takeaway is wrong.
In software development, we change the team structure if we find that multiple teams do the same thing for the same customers. So, in this case, redraw the state boundaries.
Because it was/is a good balance. You can take your logic all the way down to a city or all the way up to a nation and delegate or not. Having vastly different states from one another gives a citizen of a nation the freedom to easily move to somewhere else where the prospects are better and or where it aligns with your way of life more.
All you've done is state that "my idea is good because my idea is good."
A better response would be to devolve power to CSA - combined statistical areas. These are geographic units defined by economic interactions (measured in part by commuting distances).
See, CSA's make sense because they have a rationale based in recent experience. State boundaries from over a century ago do not.
Sure. But why these states in particular? You don't think it's possible that there might be a better configuration of borders/regions? It seems improbable to me that by chance we landed on the optimal structure as these borders were defined in the years spanning from colonization to the early 20th century.
You can't just 'redraw' state boundaries though. The core fallacy in this kind of thinking is that the existing political geography is all the result of some top-down design and thus subject to top-down revision. The 'United States' is more than just a name, it's a literal description. The US Federal Government is essentially a super-national body that is the product of a treaty process not too unlike that which we've more recently witnessed in the founding of the European Union. The vesting of partial sovereignty from the constituent states into the federal state does not negate the sovereignty that is retained by the constituent states. They are not mere administrative divisions subject to the redistricting whims of some legislative body.
The smaller the project/team, the easier it is to recognize mistakes and change direction. At the federal level, competing interests make that nearly impossible.
I didn't quibble with that part. I omitted it for clarity because I only intended to address the other part. I don't think that's controversial practice when quoting.
Huh? Your comments are completely ahistorical. The US federal government played a massive role in creating the states.
Examples include the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, massive Federal armed deployments against natives, the Mexican-American War, the Homestead Act. My brain is starting to break trying to fathom how completely and utterly ahistorical your assertions are. The article even makes explicit statements that contradict your claims.
Setting aside the historical facts, there's other problems with the blithe claim that "markets and states know best."
The primary fallacies in your proposal are that decentralized states will be (a) completely altruistic in allocating a pile of cash to the places that will produce the most economic benefit, (b)able to out-perform centralized economic decision-making of planners, (c) not be subject to the lobbying that so corrupts state and local governments now.
See, that's the problem with your line of thinking - it rests entirely on the assumption that markets and smaller government units are always and everywhere better at decisions than centralized governments.
A more intelligent and balanced perspective would be that sometimes centralized decision-making makes sense and sometimes decentralized decision-making makes sense.
Can we please get past this puerile debate about centralized and decentralized decision-making? It's completely dependent on the context and requires deep thinking not comforting ideological platitudes.
This is like the opposite of central planning. It appears to be proposing that we should manage political/economic regions as they actually exist, along naturally occurring boundaries, rather than imposing arbitrary boundaries (like state borders) and managing that way.
> decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies.
Wow, no thanks. There are already plenty of differences from one state to another. Having to deal with a radically different regulatory/trade environment from one state to the next is not helpful to business.
I think people neglect how much centralized regulations and processes can reduce cognitive load. Perhaps there's increase cost to the individual regulation, but the reduction in cognitive load and wasted time likely offsets that cost substantially in many cases.
For those regulations where it doesn't we should reexamine and figure out a better way if possible, but I think people should better appreciate what having good government allows you to stop thinking about and start focusing on the things that matter.
Also, those regulations provide freer markets - free from the distortions of corruption and abuse. They provide safer markets which attract more investors, because they feel they won't get cheated.
> Having to deal with a radically different regulatory/trade environment from one state to the next is not helpful to business.
Of all the websites on the internet to argue this... Are you forgetting that YC made(/makes?) their applicants move to San Francisco? Again, SF didn't randomly become a tech hub because of some will or want, they just so happened to have attractive culture and conducive laws for startups at the right time.
Are you sure that you want to claim that these differences are categorically not helpful for business?
(Aside: this is the very reason that federally mandated net neutrality is a bad idea. Alaska has less than 750k inhabitants, 300k of which live in Anchorage. Alaska is 16.13% of this country by land mass. Are you really comfortable with denying very poor and very remote communities their right to enter into a contract for ad-injected or domain-whitelisted internet at a lower price because you can't stand the thought of your Netflix being throttled?)
Maybe the richer states can buy up the bankrupt states and eventually we'll end up with the state of New York and the state of California, probably a few city-state holdouts.
Or, you get financially irresponsible rural areas sucking tax money from the urban areas. In the state in which I live, 80 cents of every state tax dollar that I pay goes to some rural area where they waste the money on unnecessary police cruisers and rarely-used fire trucks. The state government is one big welfare system for the rural elite.
> decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies.
What does that even mean? The Constitution guarantees free flow of goods and services between all 50 states. We don't need trade agreements between groups of states for anything, it doesn't get any freer than it currently is.
There has been a notable trend away from state power towards federal centralization. It's not a centralized mandate but has been happening through numerous slivers and cuts over the last few decades. Additionally, there has been a significant growth in executive power over federal thanks to the Bush administration pioneering work, which Obama continued to expand.
It just means that a rail line to the state border is less interesting than a rail line between two cities. Agreeing to invest in the rail line (or just working to establish compatible easements) would be an arrangement that might enhance both economies.
This reminds me of the argument for free market capitalism. In theory it seems like a great idea, but in practice it is just abused to death. Proponents will just say "it wasn't implemented correctly", because short of founding your own country and creating all the rules from scratch it can't be implemented correctly.
In reality is far easier to take away rights and discriminate on the state or local level. In a perfect world, people would have high mobility and it would be feasible to move from a state that represents you poorly to one that represents you better. Over time, presumably, people would prefer states that took better care of their people and protected their rights more.
In reality, the people that need the often late and insufficient protections of the federal government are the exact people that have the least mobility in society. In these cases, the federal government can serve a useful purpose, however bloated and inefficient as it may be.
It reminds me of monolithic kernels vs microkernels. Microkernels may be more architecturally appealing and may have many benefits on paper but where the rubber meets the road, monolithic kernels have won out. You can create all kinds of hypothetical circumstances where a microkernel wins, (free market capitalism, libertarianism, etc), but without some nonexistant force to enforce some kind of level playing field, you end up with what we have: a big monolithic patchwork of one off fixes and workarounds.
Designing a society is hard, designing a huge software system is hard and there is a reason why so many corners have to get cut to make shit work. The system evolves all the time and giving lots of power to the states just helps the powerful in their divide-and-conquer campaign against the rest of us.
Now if you excuse me I have to attempt to figure out whether it is easier to move to another state or another country.
Also, state government is far less democratic. Very few people vote for their state legislators or know what they do, making it easier for a small, powerful group to control them. That's the main reason many political operators push for more power in state capitals, IMHO.
Isn't the reason I don't vote for my state legislators or know what they do that most of the power to influence my life has been taken by the federal government?
I pay no attention to my state legislature because their activities seem uninteresting and irrelevant. Most people spend their time instead focusing on the federal government because federal policies are the ones everyone thinks should solve the world's problems.
But I have no voice in the federal government. Congress is mostly crippled because it's politicians have to be all things to all of too many people in order to be elected and stay in office.
If more power rested in my state of 3 million people I would certainly feel a greater sense of empowerment. In an electorate of that size I would have some chance of helping to drive public discourse about how to design a better healthcare system or how to improve the economy in my little part of the world. I might even stand some chance of electing an independent or 3rd party candidate that actually agrees with me on more than one issue rather than having to pick from one of the two crappy candidates with funding from billionaires in far-off realms that I have available now.
I think many people feel the same as I do and suspect that, if there were a transfer of power to the states, then democracy at the state level would flourish, surpassing what we now have at the federal level, as people perceive their increased control over their government and increased investment in its activity.
Sadly, I have no hard data to back up this thesis, and have never been able to think of a good way of looking for data to either confirm or refute it.
I whole-heartedly support this suggestion. Devolution of economic and political authority has been a model for success throughout history. Central planning, not so much. Not that it can't be, but we are replete with examples of it failing disastrously.
However, the author of the article does get at a very interesting and relevant point, which is that the political system in the U.S., at both the state and federal level, is now badly out of date and does not reflect the contemporary realities of where the population centers are and how their economies work. It does seem like our country would greatly benefit from a broad reorganization of political-economy amongst the states and at the federal level as well.
Central planning, not so much. Not that it can't be, but we are replete with examples of it failing disastrously.
Wasn't the Interstate Highway system a boon to the US economy? Wouldn't infrastrucure projects between the meta-urban regions fall into much the same pattern?
I don't think anyone is saying that the Federal government is without purpose. Interstate highways are exactly the type of project the Federal government should be taking on.
That's not the type of central planning described in the article, this is the Federal government correcting a legitimate failing of a confederation. What was in the best interest of each state was opposed to the interests of the country as a whole.
It's exactly analogous the position of a classical economist, except the states are the individual actors. Yes, markets sometimes fail, and it ought to be the duty of a central government to correct those failures when they happen but economic intervention should be rare and only when absolutely necessary.
central planning has a role to play. for certain types of projects it is appropriate and sometimes even necessary. however, the idea that central planning should be the starting point for economic development is wrong-headed in my opinion. it should be considered the exception, used when needed and not otherwise, not the rule.
additionally, I challenge the notion that interstate infrastructure projects are actually examples of central planning. they are more like examples of networks of mutual development and collaboration between diverse partners. adoption of shared technical standards, agreement on shared funding models, and legal compacts to ensure shared responsibility for maintenance and upkeep are what drives projects like the interstate highway system.
> Devolution of economic and political authority has been a model for success throughout history
I disagree. As examples, the U.S. didn't get going until the Articles of Confederation were replaced with the strong central government of the Constitution. Devolution of political power is what led to the Civil War, segregation, and now attempts to legally discriminate against gay citizens and deny votes to many more.
Devolution is generally advocated by people who don't like being democratically outvoted in the current arrangement.
there is a considerable difference between devolution (the _return_ of authority from a central position to the states) and a weak and insufficiently binding treaty such as the articles of confederation.
for devolution to occur there must have first been a strong central authority to devolve those powers in the first place. the lack of a strong central authority can be problematic, as the situation with the articles of confederation demonstrates. that is not the situation I'm discussing though.
the example of the institution of slavery and the noxious "states rights" argument made by southern slavers at the time is a historical outlier. its such an exceptional (and not in a good way) that I really hesitate to hold it up as typical of any situation at all. its very sui generis.
the current situation where southern states (the same ones that used to be slave states, it seems), are trying to pass laws to institutionalize anti-gay bigotry is an interesting discussion that I'm willing to have on this issue. you make a good point. there are definitely people in those states who are putting forward a pro-devolution argument in favor of their stance.
as a counterpoint though, I would say that the movement for gay marriage itself began using exactly the same strategy. gay marriage advocates (and I was one in New York) lobbied their state governments to pass laws that supported their position. they were willing to do this without the support of the federal government and in fact for many years the gay marriage movement was deeply hesitant to elevate the issue to the federal level for fear that a federal circuit court, or congress itself, would shut them down. it was only once critical mass of cultural change had occurred that the gay marriage movement was willing and able to successfully make their case at the federal level and win the supreme court decision.
my point is that devolution is just a methodology for governance. it is neutral with respect to policy. which policy the people want is determined by their culture. devolution of authority allows cultural movements to work with relatively less impediment from distant central authorities that might want to shut them down. we should still participate actively in our local cultures though, in order to transform society into what we want it to be. less bigotry. more love. those are my goals for cultural transformation.
Thanks for a thoughtful response - and about politics! It's positively un-American these days! A few points in response, hopefully equally thoughtful:
First, to expand on one point, note that the devolution also is or was used by segregationists, by pro-life advocates, and by Obamacare opponents, to name a few. But to the heart of it:
1) Consider these questions: Name your local state Representative, state Senator and their opponent(s) in this year's election. How about the leader(s) of your state house(s)? Maybe you know, but I think you'll agree that probably <10% or even <5% of voters can answer even the first question.
2) Is there a real chance those incumbents will lose? If like (most? many?) people these days there is not, then to whom are those representatives accountable?
3) If citizens have no awareness of and often no choice about their state representatives (or their activities), then state legislatures are not democratic, de facto. It makes them much easier targets for influence by the well-funded few and I know that some, such as the Koch organizations, have pushed devolution for that very reason, and conduct much/most of their activity at state and local levels.
Regardless of the principle or theory behind it, most advocates use it when it serves their purposes: When they are being outvoted in Washington and so they seek a different forum, and when a powerful few want more political control, as described above (including people left-of-center, as you point out, though my impression is that it's less common).
Personally I think it's a political tool, good for some things and bad for others, and I look at the outcomes: Which gets better results? My highest principle is people's health, liberty and welfare, not abstract theories of government.
Go find yourself one of those old rail corridors. You'll notice they don't always take what seems to be the straightest or even the most sensible route.
Find a historical society that knows about the rail and they'll be all too happy to tell you why. Typically the reroute was because some business interest bought off the company and they went miles out of their way to come to him. They'll also be able to tell you about the abandoned town that should have been on the route, but withered and died after the railroad went around them (not unlike the little towns along Route 66 a century later).
Occasionally it'll be because some landholder wouldn't let them cut across his homestead, but usually it was graft.
> c) not be subject to the lobbying that so corrupts the Congress now.
You seem to be operating under the belief this is harder than corrupting State and/or local governments.
Hint: It is easier, not harder.
> b) able to out-perform the decentralized economic decision-making mechanism of the market (prices),
Corruption is done via the marketplace at market prices within an ideological range the constituency will accept. I'm uncertain why you think that isn't market-based.
> a) completely altruistic in allocating a pile of cash to the places that will produce the most economic benefit
If they were paid the market price to perform this function then, yes, they could do so. Nothing prevents that.
> Here's an alternate proposal: decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies. Reduce the federal take of taxes, leaving the money in the hands of the people who actually innovate, employ, and make economic decisions.
Corruption at the local level is pervasive, extensive, and frequently impossible to fight due to the fact the only people with the financial resources are the ones who bought the local government in the first place [or nonprofits who cover a greater area, such as the ACLU, and able to bring in out of area money to compete against the corruption].
If you think this is a recipe for reducing corruption, I suggest you get involved in local politics and try to support a minority candidate in a heavily white area. Hell, they'll do all sorts of legal [but shady] shit like hire a guy with the same name [different middle initial] and put them both on the ballot to split the vote. You only need to pull of a few percentage points of support this way to win in many situations.
> The fantasies of central planners never end.
The fantasies of people who think decentralization reduces corruption never end either.
Well if nothing else, your points about corruption are arguments against government in general :-) Decentralize power back to the people themselves. If I have no power over another, then my corruption affects only me.
However, corruption at the local level affects a limited number of people, and since local politics are easy to influence, they can be changed. Local politicians get into criminal trouble all the time, so they are not immune to the law.
Corruption at the national level affects all of us, and it's much harder to change the institutions. Even worse is the bureaucracy, which cannot be changed directly by the people, but meddles incessantly with our economy.
As for escaping corruption, you can leave your city easily, your state with moderate difficulty, but your country with great difficulty.
>your points about corruption are arguments against government in general
This is not the case. The first step of "divide and conquer" is "divide."
>If I have no power over another, then my corruption affects only me.
That's how how corruption works. It's not a property of individuals, it's a property of institutions.
>corruption at the local level affects a limited number of people
At first. Then two corrupt local levels team up, and there's nobody to stop them. Corrupt organizations don't require regulatory action to form alliances. Even if you decentralize everything on paper, they will be centralized in practice, because corruption causes some people to have disproportionate means to get what they want.
Agreed. It's easier for me to smell something fishy when my working class neighbor pulls up in the new Benz. Much more difficult when it's the massive amount of luxury homes going up along the Potomac.
> Well if nothing else, your points about corruption are arguments against government in general :-) Decentralize power back to the people themselves. If I have no power over another, then my corruption affects only me.
Tragedy of the Commons is what occurs then as well as an inability to defend oneself against those who use force.
Go move to some country with essentially a nonexistent government and see how this works out for you if you genuinely believe I am wrong.
> However, corruption at the local level affects a limited number of people, and since local politics are easy to influence, they can be changed. Local politicians get into criminal trouble all the time, so they are not immune to the law.
So your argument is to make it cheaper, easier, and dismantle the checks and balances by defunding the enforcement mechanism at the federal level?
Seriously? Do you not understand that logically plays out until the local politicians are unable to be held accountable to a higher authority?
On the one hand, yes, the overbearing and excessively taxing nature of the Feds is a problem for local governments trying to do things, nowhere moreso than in the northeast, home of state such as New Jersey, which pays an enormous amount of federal taxes and receives something like $0.50 on the dollar back.
On the other hand, it's sensible to have the federal government make transfer payments between the states in an attempt to equalize development and keep the beneficial union together.
State governments are, if anything else, even more dysfunctional than the federal government. D.C. telling Chicago what to do is pretty inane, but Springfield doing so is even more inane. I like the idea of decentralization, but the states are the wrong vehicle for doing that. We should get rid of the states, and decentralize the federal government, with autonomy pushed down into the various major economic centers (New York, LA, Houston, etc).
Though really we should be crediting the earth for creating the tech industry, for without the earth neither the government nor the tech industry could have formed.
Actually we should credit the sun. For without the sun we would have no earth.
Wait, wait a minute! This line of reasoning seems ridiculous!
Why? Its the same reason we don't credit the government for every accomplishment ever made. We focus on the key players. Could the government have been a key player here? Perhaps. But your line of reasoning is not the reason.
Silicon Valley's origins are deeply entwined with the military industrial complex and federal money. To argue otherwise is historical revisionism.
William Shockley is credited with making Silicon Valley what it is today. He was a federal researcher who hired eight other federal researchers. [1] They then created Fairchild Semiconductor which developed transistors for the aerospace industry.
Look up the history of Shockley, Noyce, Fairchild, Intel.
All you have proven is that it would be equally ridiculous to say "a tech hub would have happened with or without the sun" or "a tech hub would have happened with or without the earth."
Though one may not credit the federal government for the creation of an industry, it is ridiculous to say that such an industry would exist without the government's existence. Govennment is a necessary prerequisite even if it deserves no "credit".
I think it's hard to do argue that the federal government wasn't involved. Don't forget why they call them hookers, General Hooker was the source of the name during Civil War and it wasn't B.C. he used them himself.
That's not a true story [1], although you're not the first person I've heard it from. The sex industry was thriving well before the US government, or any other government around today, however. And it would be very hard to argue that the US government has ever been formally "involved" with the sex industry, except as a regulatory presence.
What about the Erie Canal and the B&O Railroad? Those were government funded projects in the Northeast that had massive, massive impact. You can definitely draw a line between that economic jump start and the current distribution.
It wasn't organic at all. The NE corridor has a powerful, although declining in many ways, economic engine as a result of nearly 400 years of access to the best transportation resources available: water, later canals, later railroads eventually interstate.
If you think the Congress is a cesspool of corruption, state governments are the scum at the bottom.
Examples:
- The legislative leaders of New York were just convicted of felony charges. About a half dozen of their colleagues have been convicted of various corruption crimes in the last few years.
- The NJ governor basically stole Federal aid intended to rebuild the overloaded and damaged Hudson River rail tunnels that connect NYC to NJ and the rest of the country by rail.
I agree that this regional vision is pretty dumb. But, I think the Federal government has a pretty good record on planning and funding transportation infrastructure.
For me to consider your proposal you will have to explain California's high speed rail system which has been grossly warped from the original vision and promise by purely local interests.
I'm not sure why you believe that states are any better. Central planners are everywhere, even down at the regional and local levels. I've lived in ten different towns / cities in five different states, and each had its share of central planning, for better or worse.
I've worked with several different county or city planning boards, and have found them to be reasonable and diligent. It is possible for local government to function, even if there are many examples of it not doing so.
On that topic, don't even get me started on the wastewater agencies. At both the state and local levels, they have repeatedly failed to accomplish anything fairly or effectively.
>>Reduce the federal take of taxes, leaving the money in the hands of the people who actually innovate, employ, and make economic decisions.
Are you suggesting that the federal government doesn't innovate or employ (which would be wrong), or that the states are better at those things than the federal government (which would require a citation)?
The federal government has proven more times than any other organization that they are inept and inefficient at almost every task they undertake.
And yet the people all but demand that they do more, more, more.
Please! Take more of my money and more of my individual liberty! And in return please send me more regulation, bureaucracy, inefficient waste, and general mismanagement! I can't get enough!
The government isn't the most efficient organization in the world, but for some problems it's the only kind of organization that can reasonably address the problem. If there isn't a plausible alternative organizational structure to solve a problem, then by definition and despite its problems government is the most efficient organization we have.
Take for example national infrastructure, it's hard to imagine a way for private corporations to be incentivized to create roads to even the smallest communities. The individual roads aren't going to be profitable enough on a reasonable timescale. However the value of the whole network of roads is greater than the sum of its parts.
Even if you had a private corporation that was willing, in infrastructure you have essentially natural monopolies. It's very valuable to build the first road from A to B. It's far less valuable to build the second. Look at how we've done internet infrastructure, and how little competition there is to a single one or two providers in most areas. Observe how it's hard to get high speed internet to rural locations. Tons of problems fit this structure, probably the best example is water infrastructure. Build once, use forever, structural challenges to competition.
Government is essentially the only solution to these kinds of natural monopolies that ensures that more than a tiny population benefits from their services at a reasonable price.
Other things government does that no private system is able to replicate at the same scale:
- Funding of basic (not obviously practical in any timeline) research
- National defense
- Enforcement of contracts
- Mitigating environmental externalities
Government sucks. But let's make it better. We need good government not minimal government, those two things aren't always the same thing.
I'll point out that the parent comment was specifically targeted at federal government and not government as a concept. Many of your arguments may still hold true but at least some can be reasonably painted as responsibilities for state governments, not Washington. That was presumably the desired (tired, 200-year-old) sentiment.
Possibly, but particularly for interstate issues it's hard to see how that works. And even where it does, it's usually slow and difficult to scale.
The first thing that comes to mind is environmental issues. These have national implications that it's hard to see how even coalitions of states can have the same kind of impact. And if they did, you'd end up with a patchwork of regulations that makes it harder for business to work.
I'm a proponent of relatively stronger central government, but I know that's not a universal belief. After all, the national government is a coalition of all the states :)
It's also worth pointing out that private corporations with sufficient scale to plan and build road networks are also fantastically inefficient organizations in many respects...
You're right, bureaucracy/red tape generally increases with size.
But the federal government is distinctly different in one major way: private corporations must make money. The federal government is immune to going out of business.
> it's the only kind of organization that can reasonably address the problem.
I agree with your broad point. Which is why we should let the gov do whats necessary, and get it out of everything else because of how wildly it is inefficient. We need to get it out of:
- health care
- education
- providing pensions
Its no coincidence that the areas were there is the biggest mix of gov and private are also some of the worst industries to deal with.
First, we effectively have government mandated healthcare now: hospitals aren't allowed to turn people away. Would you like to change that? Have people dying in the waiting room if they can't prove insurance? Or people not being picked up by an ambulance because they were out for a run and didn't have their insurance card on them (or worse, being profiled about whether they're likely to pay)?
I think most people, when it comes down to it, think some level of healthcare is a service everyone in the U.S. is entitled to, just because we can provide it and nobody wants to see people dying on the streets or in hospital waiting rooms.
If you disagree with that, then I guess we can just agree to disagree.
But assuming you agree that everyone should be guaranteed some level of care, then it's just a matter of efficiently providing it.
Here we get to where "insurance" is a fundamentally flawed system for delivering health care. With insurance, risk is spread out so everyone pays (cost of healthcare) * P(need of health care). The issue is everyone has dramatically different P's so it's impossible to pool the risk effectively. If you have a pre-existing condition, then your P is 100% and no insurer in their right mind is going to want to accept you.
If you get diagnosed with something, you won't be able to change insurance providers, you'll be desperately tied to your current provider, etc.
Now the government could step in as it has now with Obamacare in the U.S., and stop insurers from blocking pre-existing conditions, but then to make that economically viable you need to require citizens to pay for health insurance...
So all told, if you come from the perspective that we're a rich enough country to provide some level of health care to our citizens, then the best, most efficient way to do it, is to have the government involved.
Start a hospital and your obligation to accept all ECU patients will be the smallest of your worries - a law which I agree with.
Every. Little. Detail. about healthcare is regulated. From the years of doctors education, from where they must go to school, to who can do what procedures, to how many volts your power supply can ripple, to the brand of emergency generator your hospital is allowed to use, to they types of investments your hospital is allowed to make, to the types of antiquated file formats your hospital records must support. I am not even scratching the surface. It's not that the regulations are bad intentioned or even bad ideas, its that following them is huge, huge overhead that prevents innovation and competition. Heck, the state has essentially conspired with the AMA to limit the number of doctors. It's a classic barrier to entry exmaple that professions lobby for. And it's the reason a highly trained doctors still need to perform the majority of simple procedures. Because that how the doctors want it.
Depending on your state, there are between 800,000 and 1,500,000 pages of health regulations. The affordable care act is 20,000 pages alone, and that is just one regulation among hundreds.
Healthcare is the most over regulated industry in the United States. Bar none. And it has been a disaster.
AS for preexising conditions, my stance is that If the taxpayers want that, then the tax payers are more than welcome to foot the bill. It doesn't even make sense to have insurance companies, which insure against risk, to provide it.
I think I can see a case for getting out of providing pensions, but I would respectfully disagree about broadly getting out of healthcare and education. Certainly in certain subsections of those areas there is much to improve and perhaps less government involvement would be good, but I think overall it's not a great plan. My reasoning is as follows:
For healthcare it's hard to see how a system that is even more privatized than the one in the US would do well. Healthcare is an area where there are massive information asymmetries and where price discovery is hard to do. If I need a trauma surgeon or a broken leg fixed, then I'm not going to "shop around" for the best one. For less time sensitive problems you end up with issue 2:
It's a sector where it's not obvious how to measure quality. Is the doc with the fewest patients that die the best one? Maybe he's the guy who gets the sickest patients because he's actually the best at handling the complicated cases, so more of his patients die because they start out sicker!
Education faces some of the same problems. It's notoriously hard to measure great teaching, though I'm sure we've had great teachers and "we'd know it when we see it". It's also an area where the feedback between the service you buy and the result of the service is highly decoupled in time. It can take years after you've finished your education to figure out if it was a good deal or not.
Now I'm sure there are ways in which government should leave these sectors. I have heard interesting arguments (though personally I don't agree with them) about getting out of financing student loans, or doing it differently (those I'm usually more in agreement). It's harder for me to see how I would want less government in my healthcare, I think we have a far too private system as it stands, but maybe in terms of HIPAA. I think medical data should have strong privacy protections, but I've definitely seen how the protections currently enforced are counterproductive. I also think it makes it way too hard to get a hold of your own data for personal use.
Anyway, these are issues where plenty of people have different opinions. It's good to talk them out and debate :)
> I think we have a far too private system as it stands
Its a public private mix. Not nearly as private as say the restaurant industry, tech industry, or even airlines industry, etc. Definitely very high up there on the 'regulated' scale as well. It's funny you admit the government is inefficient, but want it to run all of healthcare? Why? What is fundamentally so hard about having a competitive healthcare economy?
You bring up a good point about information asymmetries. I think private audit and review companies would do very well in this information economy. Perhaps the government if anything could disseminate this information freely.
ECU perhaps needs to be handled different though the majority of healthcare spending is not ECU.
My argument is not that government is inefficient and so it shouldn't be used, my argument is that despite inefficiencies it's appropriate to use in certain cases because the alternatives are worse.
I think with regards to healthcare, the private insurance market has proven to be insanely inefficient. We have a patchwork of insurance laws across states, profit motivated insurance companies, and just overall opacity at every level of the system. All this and if you look at more centralized government managed systems, overall outcomes seem no worse and in some cases better. It's hard to measure quality in healthcare, as I mentioned above, but by many of those metrics the US system isn't doing radically better than, say, European systems which are largely single payer government organized or close to it. All that despite paying as much as 30% more.
There are lots of questions and issues in healthcare, it's a really complicated question. One thing that's pretty clear is that as much as 50% of your entire lifetime healthcare spend will be spent in your last 6 months of life. At that stage how can a private market work? "Hey, I'm dying let me shop around for the best ICU"?
All of the alternatives involve tradeoffs, usually in autonomy in deciding care (single payer can become a huge HMO) and difficulty in ensuring appropriate supply (waiting months for a CT scan you actually needed yesterday). I believe there are ways to solve those even with a centralized system, and I'm fairly convinced that our private market has done a poor job serving the majority of patients (unless you're fairly wealthy, and even then the structural inefficiencies of a fragmented system get in the way).
Re. private audit and review companies: It turns out a lot of docs are on Yelp and other similar services. I'll admit to looking at them when I look for a provider. But those systems have really perverse effects as well. People usually don't know what the is best thing for them to do medically, but they love it when the doc agrees with them. As a result a doc is pushed toward being more agreeable, prescribing what the patient wants instead of what they need.
Patient says, "I want antibiotics". Doc says, "but it's likely viral". Patient says, "I want antibiotics". The doc who caves gets better reviews.
Good medicine is hard to evaluate, and a patient is poorly equipped to evaluate relative quality, but he/she is also poorly informed as to what is a good price. You could say, "let's get rid of opacity." But one of the drivers for opacity is the private insurance system. No insurer wants what they're paying for X procedure to be known by their competitors, that complicates their negotiating position.
You could force regulation that would open all this up, but then aren't you just growing government involvement in healthcare regulation?
With so many asymmetries and so much opacity it's hard to see how a private system does better. That said, it's worthy of discussion and a complicated topic, so I really enjoy learning of other opinions.
I think you have a pretty naive and overly optimistic view of human organizations other than the US federal government.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
In general very large organizations can be problematic. Very large organizations with massive (universal) scope are at even greater risk.
Unfortunately, what's the alternative? We've tried devolving tasks back to private organizations and smaller governments. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.
I find it interesting how so many people on both side of the "big government/smaller government" debate apparently don't have the word "sometimes" in their vocabulary.
"What is needed, in some ways, is a return to this more flexible, broader way of thinking." Well, if the courts and the White House (as inhabited by Democrats AND Republicans) wouldn't keep moving power from the states to the federal executive, then maybe there would be more flexibility. Instead, what we have is a slow and constant undermining of the idea that states should serve as laboratories of democracy,[1] and a steady disappearance of the federal nature of the system in the U.S.
If state laws that ban municipalities from going against state policies on fracking, affordable housing, marriage, lgbt discrimination, and the like, are anything to go by, states are no better stewards of this kind of power.
True. But there are 50 of them in the United States. While moving to a state with more sensible laws is obviously less liquid than spending your money elsewhere, it's nevertheless a marketplace with 50 participants and they do learn from each others' experiments. Generally, the more decisions that are handed further down the hierarchy the better. If some matters are locked up at the state level, that might be a shame, but we should at least be happy they are not stuck at the federal level.
How exactly does your model propose to fix the issues of, say, states refusing to fill the gap in health care coverage because of their opposition to the entire existence of the federal government?
Some things need to be guaranteed for every American citizen, and that can't simply be left up to the states to "experiment" with. We're talking about government here, not scrum teams.
> Some things need to be guaranteed for every American citizen, and that can't simply be left up to the states to "experiment" with. We're talking about government here, not scrum teams.
There is virtually no way to have a consensus on what precisely needs to be guaranteed. I would personally prefer to move to a state that does not "guarantee" health insurance (I will pay for health insurance myself).
But like I said, moving isn't a liquid matter. There's quite a bit of friction involved. So states are imperfect, yes. But I still prefer 50 imperfect laboratories to 1 imperfect monolith. The potential of moving to a local maximum of ideal-fit with my tastes means a lot to me.
For what it's worth, the same rationale is why I do not believe the United States should adopt any given policy simply because it is done by a majority of other first-world countries. Policies should stand on their merits and should not be adopted simply to be aligned with other countries. I prefer diversity.
> There is virtually no way to have a consensus on what precisely needs to be guaranteed. I would personally prefer to move to a state that does not "guarantee" health insurance (I will pay for health insurance myself).
There was a consensus; we call it the Constitution. The problem is that American lawmakers today aren't able to negotiate a single law let alone a document like that.
States are not really a solution to that problem: large states have gridlock much like the feds, and small states create the patchwork of laws that prevent me from mailing you a beer but ensuring some lawyer at LargeCo will be paid to figure it out. And all states are more vulnerable to corporate capture than the feds are.
Laboratories of democracy work when we have democracies that are worth studying, and when politicians adopt fact-based policies instead of ideological ones. But we do not live in that world, and have not for at least 30 years.
> How exactly does your model propose to fix the issues of, say, states refusing to fill the gap in health care coverage because of their opposition to the entire existence of the federal government?
You ever think that there might be societal benefits to people living near their family? Such as help with child care, for example. Moving isn't that simple. And it requires a significant upfront cost.
This is really just a matter of definition at this point. The entities which actually hold governmental power are by definition 'states'. The individual states which make up the EU are what grant the organization its power. The individual states in the US are what grant the Federal government its power.
Central planners think that there should be one state, the US state, where the individual "states" derive their power from the Fed. And if you think that the states should be small municipalities then that's fine too. But it's not hypocritical that municipalities derive their power from, and are restricted by, the state.
* Drug laws (i.e.: Colorado has "legalized" marijuana but it's still federally illegal and for now the federal government is just ignoring enforcement for now, but there's no reason, e.g. Ted Cruz would continue to do so.) The laws are based on "interstate commerce" which the federal government how power over, yet somehow it still applies to state-grown marijuana.
* A lot of stuff very close to a "war" has been done without states actually voting to go to war.
* Personally, I'd like a state to be able to experiment with a basic income guarantee and corresponding removal of minimum wage, but that wouldn't be possible because of the federal minimum wage law.
* Federal agencies like the FBI, CIA, and NSA have been growing in power lately with their FISA court rubber stamps and attempted use of All Writs.
This type of gerrymandering or repartition is a rich part of US voting history. The legal term might be "apportionment" or the math term could be "equipartition".
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States
which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers
which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons,
including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, & excluding Indians not
taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand,
but each State shall have at least one Representative;…
These touch questions about geographical fairness have always existed. In the 21st century, these might be solved with computational geometry.
This type of gerrymandering or repartition is a rich part of US voting history... In the 21st century, these might be solved with computational geometry.
Or by getting rid of the notion of apportionment altogether.
There's no reason, in an always-connected society in which people can telecommute to work, that people's votes should be aggregated (counted up and applied) based on their geographic proximity.
Instead, votes should be aggregated exactly at the level of governance to which they apply. For example, representatives to city government should be elected by city-wide ballot, not ward-by-ward. State reps should be elected by state-wide ballot, not district-by-district. National reps should be elected by national ballot, not state-by-state.
Forcing geographical aggregation on people just strips geographically-distributed minorities of their power. If, say, 5% of the country's population consists of radical vegetarian pacifists (RVPs) who would vote for a RVP slate, then why shouldn't 5% of the nation's representatives (give or take) come from an RVP party? Yet if those 5% are distributed evenly throughout the country, they can have no party, and no dedicated direct voice, because the current system dilutes their votes among those of people who happen to live near them.
"Let the people gerrymander themselves!"
Of course, this would require changing the system, and would reduce the power of those who control the current system. Therefore it is extremely unlikely ever to happen.
(By the way, some might object that such a change would make small states lose their voice at the national level. But everybody who thinks their state's interests are threatened by some national policy, can form a party and vote its representatives into office. I'm not saying geography shouldn't be considered at all-- I'm just saying it shouldn't be the only means of aggregating votes.)
I don't think it's pedantic. It changes the meaning of the map drastically. Most major cities in the US are not capital cities. In the top 10 states by population, only one is a capital city (using 2014 numbers).
Tangentially to the article's point, Colin Woodward has an excellent book called American Nations, in which he identifies and tracks forward 11 distinct cultures formed by the way they colonized. His map: http://emerald.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/images/fea...
I grew up in Minnesota and then went to school in New York and I can definitively say that Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin should not be included in whatever "Yankeedom" is, and I think my fellow B1G fans would say the same (a certain bar on the upper west side notwithstanding).
I'll have to read the book...maybe he makes a clearer argument than in this map, or is selecting on some variable I'm not seeing.
I've also lived in south Georgia (a little over a year) and Seattle (4 years), and have traveled those areas extensively. Those parts of the map definitely ring true to me, especially the "left coast" designation for the PNW (a lot of my friends in Seattle jokingly called it that) and the "New France" designation for the NOLA area.
I'll definitely be checking this book out - thanks for the recommendation.
This reminds me of a joke I barely remember... the sum of which was, nobody considers themselves a yankee, it's always someone else. Southerners think of the North as yankee. Northerners think of New England as yankee, New Englanders think of New York as yankee, etc.
The British think of all US citizens as Yankees. The look on a rural Georgian's face when an English acquaintance referred to him as a Yankee is one of my treasured memories.
funny you should say that, because New York City is not part of Yankeedom on that map. Its in New Netherlands, which is basically a city state around the NYC metro area.
Now, I'm not saying that you're wrong. I'm a New Yorker that went to school in western Massachusetts so I know those two cultures very well. Not so much about The Great Lakes midwest. I think the map is meant to reflect economics as much as cultures though and certainly the St. Lawrence Seaway and Eerie Canal shipping routes, as well as the major railroads in the region, have established very strong economic ties between Yankeedom and the Great Lakes region.
I've not read the book, only a summary a article[1]. The article includes short descriptions of his groupings. Here is Yankeedom:
Founded by Puritans, residents in Northeastern states and the industrial Midwest tend to be more comfortable with government regulation. They value education and the common good more than other regions.
That fits Minneapolis to me, but maybe not so much the rest of the upper midwest, and not even all of (rural) Minnesota. I think it's less about culture and more about community spirit and civic-mindedness. For example, in the recent NYT map of "Life expectancy of 40-year-olds with household incomes below $28,000,
adjusted for race"[2], Minnesota and the northeast look fairly similar (along with Washington and Oregon). Or look at Presidental election results.
Wisconsin used to fit this, but is drifting apart from Minnesota, as discuss in this piece[3].
The Northeastern megalopolis, stretching from Boston to Washington, contains more than 50 million people and represents 20 percent of America’s gross domestic product. Greater Los Angeles accounts for more than 10 percent of G.D.P. These city-states matter far more than most American states — and connectivity to these urban clusters determines Americans’ long-term economic viability far more than which state they reside in.
This reshuffling has profound economic consequences. America is increasingly divided not between red states and blue states, but between connected hubs and disconnected backwaters.
If you're wondering why 8 million Americans[1] have voted for Donald Trump in this election cycle, look no further than this snippet. The elitist garbage is so thick and so deep I had to put on waders - the ones I normally reserve for venturing through my backwater community. Using faceless macro-economics to justify ripping power away from suburban and rural communities is the exactly the type of liberalism that pissed off every person Trump is appealing to right now.
The very idea that a nation state should be organized not according to the political will of its citizens, but according to the most efficient allocation of capital, is contrary to the very idea of the democratic republic America is built upon.
Furthermore, I echo the opinions of others in this thread who have suggested that the individual rights of citizens are better protected when power is decentralized to the states, and after the states, to county and municipal governments, hopefully leaving the bulk of the authority in the hands of the citizens themselves.
In what way is that snippet even partially incorrect? In what way is it elitist?
Are you arguing that most states do matter more than the DC-Boston corridor? That region as a state would be the 3rd most populous, and 1st in GDP.
Are you arguing that the country isn't divided between connected metropolises and disconnected backwaters? Maybe you take offense at the phrase "backwater", but regardless, the rural areas of this country are disconnected in many ways: they have extremely few transportation options, low import/export capacity, slow and sparse internet and cell coverage.
The article isn't arguing that power be ripped from rural areas, but that in order to let the very important urban areas, where most of the population and economic activity is, thrive, they shouldn't be so hindered by state boundaries and politics.
Urban areas that cover multiple states have more in common internally, than states do between their internal urban and rural areas. This shouldn't be a controversial idea.
And in what way do states represent the political will of the citizens? Did any of us actually vote to determine the current state configurations? No, those were mostly done either by pre-independence forces, like England, or by the Federal government. Today's citizens certainly didn't have a say. Power to the people indeed.
But, currently, it's just the opposite! Power is by definition "ripped away" from residents of urban areas (or any dense areas) due to the fixed population-invariant representation of each state in the U.S. Senate (and partly, electoral college).
(E.g., North Dakota has the same representation in the Senate as California, despite an order of magnitude more Americans living in California than North Dakota. That is to say, a Californian has maybe 2% of the influence via the U.S. Senate as a North Dakotan.)
Is this really fair to the large and growing proportion of Americans who live in denser areas? Some of them, like those in D.C., aren't even represented at all!
> Using faceless macro-economics to justify ripping power away from suburban and rural communities is the exactly the type of liberalism that pissed off every person Trump is appealing to right now.
Not sure if you're joking so I assume you're not. The House of Representatives doesn't balance that out.
The House gives _equal_ (approximately[1]) per-person representation to residents of high and low density states, while the Senate gives much more per-person representation to residents of low density states. To balance that out, you'd need a House that gave more per-person representation to residents of higher density states.
[1]: Actually, the error on this is as much as 50% due to the huge size of congressional districts -- there are a small number of states with as few as half a million residents per congressional district or as many as one million per. But this is not consistently biased in one direction or another towards or against denser or larger states)
> I echo the opinions of others in this thread who have suggested that the individual rights of citizens are better protected when power is decentralized to the states,
I'm sure alabama and the like would do a great job protecting rights if given free reign.
This. Seems many advocating increasing control of society forget the USA was created precisely because of a deep & pervasive hatred of being bossed around by strangers far away holding very different sociopolitical views. Don't underestimate the simmering & growing opposition to such encroaching centralized control.
Only 26% of Americans live in "urban" areas versus suburban and rural areas. Considering 53% of Americans live in suburbs, we should allow the suburbs to have the balance of power?
If so, I predict more highways, more car centric growth, less investment in public transit or bicycles paths.
I think putting San Diego in a different group than Los Angeles was also rather odd...
Edit: now that I look at it, I would also question their "Urban Corridor" from Los Angeles to Las Vegas... unless they mean people travel between them easily. That corridor is mostly desert.
That first map, at least, is fairly inaccurate anyway. I've been to central Pennsylvania. They don't speak anything like the people here in southern Missouri. I mean, their speech is recognizable as English, but one couldn't say more than that.
In context Montana etc rebounded less because it fell less, and it fell less because it missed the boom.
There are many ways of looking at the US, but quality of life is more than just cost of living. The same house might cost 50k or 2.5 million just based on location, but you can't buy pollution free air, low traffic levels etc. On the other hand there are many advantages to living in or near a mega city like a wide range of good restaurants.
Even things as basic as crime stats get mixed into this. People simply get away with less crap in city's.
Getting back to politics I think America is simply less unified than people assume. People live vastly different lives and want a wide range of things.
Yes, that book remains errily relevant to this day of NAFTA and TPP.
Oddly enough reading Garreau alao taught me to appreciate how much effect the 1970s oil embargo had on the American psyche: people lived in genuine fear that the sky is falling and they will all freeze to death without heating oil. Highly recommended read if you have time.
This is interesting and it should be paired with a dramatic re-thinking of the way our democracy functions. Namely, we should abolish the Senate's overrepresentation of small, rural states. It made sense that all states got two senators in 1789, but not in 2016. Wyoming, with a population of less than a million, does not deserve the representation of two senators, the same representation that California, New York, or Texas receive. The US is less agrarian than ever. This antiquated representation makes less sense than ever and harms our democracy by under-representing urban populations.
Literally, this is exactly why the Senate was constructed in the way in which it is, as a check on mass-rule politics and the more populous states ramrodding country-wide legislation through.
It wasn't thoughtfully designed by the Founding Fathers as a check. The less populous colonies insisted on federalism and disproportionate representation as a condition of ratifying the Constitution and a compromise was reached, the same as how slaves counted for 3/5 of a person in the census.
Smaller states outpunch in the Senate, larger states outpunch in the House. As douche said, it was intended to be this way.
[Edit: Unless by "outpunch" you mean "have higher per-capita representation", in which case they punch equally in the House. But the large states dominate the House: nine states have more than half the votes.)
One being proportional to population while the other is biased towards low population doesn't balance out. You would need another chamber biased towards high population.
The empty acres of Wyoming need no such defense. The people of Wyoming do.
There is are families of issues where which side of the debate a person is on correlates strongly with his/her geographic location. On those issues, without some kind of protection, people in the less populous places will lose every time.
You could say that it's only fair for the majority to win all the time. But I've heard it said that a pure democracy is like 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on what to eat for dinner, and that doesn't sound very just to me.
It was created this way by design. I'm not saying it's good, but there's always been skew in representation. Big cities can have their power checked by smaller cities.
I'll take the counter argument. It's generally the ideologies in the most populated cities that drive Senate seats. Do you think that the vast agricultural population of California is represented by Dianne Feinstein?
In fact, it's becoming an issue even among similar cities. For example, Senator's Feinstein's stance on surveillance is at odds with many of the technorati living around the bay.
It wasn't just designed that way to allow small cities/states to check the power of big cities/states. Additionally, the federal government was designed to be both a government of the people and a government of the states. The House represented the interests of the people, and the senate represented the interests of the states. This idea (that the Senate represented the states and not necessarily the people) was pretty much wrecked by the 17th amendment, but it was nonetheless part of the original design.
> This antiquated representation makes less sense than ever and harms our democracy by under-representing urban populations.
The United States are a federal republic, a federation of fifty states, not a unitary government of 350 million people. The Senate is where the States, not the people, are represented; the House is where the people's Representatives sit.
Abolish the 17th Amendment and have state legislatures appoint Senators.
I am sympathetic to this idea, but I don't think it would work out the way you suppose. Rather than push the interests of state governments up into Washington, I think it would push Federal political debates down into state elections. Do we really want every state senate election to be fought over national issues rather than local ones?
What you're actually calling for is to completely remove the Senate since what you want is exactly how the House of Representatives is structured.
Also due to the fact that the wealth of the nation is centered in many of these urban centers I'm probably more worried about them wielding too much power in our current era of money/lobby dominated politics.
That would be like cutting off an arm because it is bleeding.
Here's an alternative off the top of my head. Each US citizen gets ONE vote no matter where they live. They vote for ONE person no matter where that person lives. The top 33 (or 34 once every six years) become United States senator.
> Each US citizen gets ONE vote no matter where they live. They vote for ONE person no matter where that person lives. The top 33 (or 34 once every six years) become United States senator.
So, we'd be ruled by American Idol winners? That doesn't seem like an improvement.
Interesting. You could have one house with 33-past-the-post and one with proportional representation, though I guess the difference would be more meaningful if it was less than 33.
Another thing that would be interesting would be choosing the government by first-past-the-post and the parliament by proportional representation, preferably in the same election, i.e. proportional representation with no coalitions allowed.
Also I'd like to add that I am not saying the plan I proposed is necessarily good. It is only at least as good as the proposal to split California.
Speaking of elections and democracy, we have more problems when it comes to state and local governments. At least many people can name who they'd like to vote for POTUS and some can even name their state senators. Given this, I think it is ridiculous to say that state legislators get to decide replacement for US Senators. I am also not a big fan of the way we do things in the house.
As an elected House member of District n of the great state of X, how do I approach any legislation? What's best for the nation is not always what's best for the businesses in state X and definitely what's good for the nation isn't always what's best for the businesses in district n.
If I am supposed to look out for the whole nation, not just people in a particular district, why am I being voted in by just people in a particular district in a particular state?
If I am supposed to look out for just my district, is this the best way to look out for the interest of my district? Anyone with one ounce of naivety removed from them can easily see that although all of our House members and Senators are supposedly equal, some are more equal than others (and not just because we have two major political parties).
You're clearly more educated on electoral systems than those who'd entertain the notion of using some novel system invented off the cuff by someone without expertise in social choice theory. Hats off.
No, the method for changing how representation is apportioned was already negotiated as part of the original constitution. You would just have to pass a constitutional amendment.
Every argument against this hinges on a very odd idea that land is more important than individuals.
Rural areas use more resources per capita, contribute less to our GDP, and are less educated than urban areas. Giving these areas a greater influence holds back progress.
No, it hinges on the idea that both states and individuals matter. The Senate represents states; the House represents individuals.
Why is it this way? Because at the Constitutional Convention, the small states were wary of being dominated by the large ones. Well, that was then: Is it still a reasonable concern? If you live in Iowa or North Dakota, say, and you don't want New York, California, and Ohio to set policy for the whole nation (including you), then yes, it's still a reasonable concern.
I couldn't disagree more. People matter. States don't.
New York, California and Ohio don't get votes. They have no say in setting national policy. The people living in them do, and they deserve to have an equal say in setting national policy as the people who live in small states.
States are just a collection of individuals. Laws are made by human beings, not land.
House: Californians and Wyomingans are equal.
Senate: Wyomingans are 48 times more important than Californians.
It doesn't balance out.
If you're ok with the senate giving greater influence to low-populated areas, would you be ok with giving rural voters a larger vote weight than urban people when electing a senator? It's contradictory to vote for senators by using "1 person 1 vote" who then do not proportionally represent the population.
No. States actually have rights, not just individuals. There's a difference between a federation and a unitary state, and federation was considered a good idea. (Short summary: any power can become a tyranny, so keep other powers around to counter the national government.)
> Laws are made by human beings, not land.
Nobody ever said that laws were made by land. But laws are made by states, not just by individuals.
> It's contradictory to vote for senators by using "1 person 1 vote" who then do not proportionally represent the population.
Only if you hold the mistaken idea that senators represent people rather than states. They don't, and they shouldn't.
>States actually have rights, not just individuals
States are arbitrary and given rights by individuals. States cannot feel the effects of any law. States are not citizens.
>(Short summary: any power can become a tyranny, so keep other powers around to counter the national government.)
That's a comforting idea in the abstract, but when applied it basically means people in rural areas should have more say in the national government than people in urban areas. You're literally in favor of taking power away from people and giving it to others. You're for tyranny of the rural rather than people being treated equally. In the age of telecommunication it makes even less sense.
We're not the EU. The idea that the US is a collection of countries went out the window a long, long time ago. Federal laws have a much bigger effect on people than state laws.
The Senate is the only place where people are not proportionally represented. To argue for it is to say that people are not equal, and that states are more important than people, which flies in the face of democracy.
EDIT: To address your point below, you're in favor of taking away power from some and giving it to others based on population density. This is a horrible idea since our cities are where our most educated and most productive live.
> You're literally in favor of taking power away from people and giving it to others.
Absolutely. For the exact same reason that we don't live in a democracy. It's a feature, not a bug.
I mean, by your argument, why have a House or a Senate? We've got telecommunications, just have a vote. Direct democracy. Why not?
Well, that turns out historically to be a really bad idea. But anything short of it is "taking power away from people and giving it to others", in one form or another.
Senators are not supposed to be directly elected. Nor are income taxes supposed to be constitutional. Fortunately, we gave up banning the production and sale of alcohol as a bad job, but these other two perverse amendments from a hundred years ago have yet to be repealed.
Fun fact: the 16th Amendment does not mean what you think it means. It was written in response to the Pollock decision, which said that a tax on income derived from property was in essence a property tax. Hence why the amendment explicitly refers to "incomes, from whatever source derived." Income taxes were, even at the time, considered constitutional (and were in fact in effect for decades prior). Indeed, the Pollock decision was later overturned, so one might say that the 16th amendment is one of the more useless ones in the Constitution.
I mean, this map (as any) has a lot of problems. The most obvious ones in my view are "How is Wyoming part of the Great Plains and not the Inland West" and "How is all of Indiana urban in the same way that Chicago is"?
But the bigger problem is twofold. First, you don't have to <redraw state lines> to do this, and it seems like a lot of HN commenters feel that redrawing states is the best approach. Second, due to Republicans who hate all government and Democrats who view all "urban planning" as inherently racist, there's no real possibility of a consensus to have any plan at all to improve American cities as a whole.
Well Eastern Wyoming is certainly part of the Great Plains. But agreed, the line across Wyoming is too far to the west and includes a significant chunk of Mountain regions in the Plains area. Maybe the author doesn't care about Wyoming. Hardly anybody lives there. Except Dick Cheney.
If they don't like it, they can petition to become states. They don't, because they don't want to: they get too many benefits by remaining territories.
While they're at it, maybe they can figure out how to move themselves so they're part of the contiguous US.
Two entire states? Try 9. Both Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware, West Virginia, and even New Jersey do not have stations on this map.
The real divide in California is not between north and south, but between coastal and inland. SF and LA have a lot more in common with each other, culturally, politically, and economically, than either of them has with Bakersfield or Fresno.
California split in half at the Monterey-SLO border? Seems awfully natural if you're going to split CA into northern and southern halves (with the boundary continuing east- I don't know the geography very well out there). That's hardly gerrymandering.
One problem with ideas like that is: how viable would such a state be by itself?
What you're proposing is probably a state with less population than Wyoming. We don't need more states like that. In fact, we should be eliminating states like RI and WY, and combining those areas with other regions to form more populous states, so we don't have this problem where we have some states that have enormous populations and some with puny populations; they should be more equal.
Instead, if northern Californians don't want to be part of the same state as the Bay Area, maybe they should push instead to join Oregon.
Edit: Sorry, I thought this was a proposal along the lines of the State of Jefferson, to break off the very northern part of California, in wine country, north of the Bay Area.
Sorry, I'm not familiar with California counties. I thought he was one of those people advocating splitting off the very northern part of California, the part north of the Bay Area. There was a movement to do that long, long ago, called the "State of Jefferson" IIRC.
Yeah, splitting the state in half around the mid-section does make sense; the state is too large, and the north and south halves are pretty different from each other. While they're at it, Las Vegas should probably join the southern half.
I find these billboards amusing when I am up in the "empty quarter". The State of Jefferson folks believe in sovereignty but wouldn't have the economy to maintain even a fraction of their roads, or to fight a fraction of their fires.
Yeah, that's why I think they should just join up with Oregon instead. They probably have a lot more in common culturally (and geographically) with Oregon than they do any place in California.
The map also totally ignores state by state rivalries. Cats up here in Oregon throw a lot of shade at California. Colorado and Oklahoma have lots of beef, but this map puts Denver and OKC in the same mega-region.
Wait, CA north of the Monterey SLO border has less population than Wyoming? The Bay Area and Sacramento? edit: this isn't viable and has Wyoming levels of population? http://imgur.com/fF5SZYJ
The biggest problem with that is the water agreements. Southern CA does not have enought water to sustain its population. It needs Northern CA. There are more people in Southern CA, so splitting the state is unlikely to pass in a state referendum.
The author's obvious disdain for rural Americans makes it hard to see through to his main point, that urban centers' power should not be inhibited by state governments.
I don't think that point stands up to scrutiny. Are state governments really hindering cities? Then why are cities growing ever more powerful, economically and culturally? And since cities contain such a large proportion of the population, they already wield proportionate power in state capitols.
The notion that urban centers are superior to rural areas is ridiculous given cities' dependence on rural agriculture, natural resource extraction, etc.
Could it be that urbanists simply don't want to be forced to confront in state legislatures the potential negative impacts their sprawling cities impose upon rural neighbors? That's the impression this article gives me.
The whole country is meshed with new railway systems that normally runs at 200 miles/hour(designed for 218 Miles/hour), it presents large pressure to local airlines and is really convenient when I travel there.
The main factor is that cities (metro areas) should not cross state boundaries, because this creates an administrative nightmare. Look at all the problems between NJ and NY because the NYC metro area includes all of northern NJ, but it has its own separate state government.
There's many, many places in this nation where different parts of a state have entirely different cultures, and really shouldn't be in the same state together. "Upstate" NY and NYC are a prime example here, but so are Chicago and rural Illinois, plus maybe the Seattle and Portland areas and the eastern sides of their respective states. Maybe a lot of people would be happier with their states broken up so they don't have their local politics dominated by people hundreds of miles away who don't share their values, and would prefer to team up with similar parts of neighboring states (eastern WA and OR might want to just join Idaho for instance).
themagician is correct though: there'd be little agreement on how to redraw things. My idea for dealing with that is to make it voluntary, at the county level, and proceed county-by-county at moving state lines around, or having referenda elections on larger changes (such as folding Rhode Island either into the eastern half of Connecticut, or combining both of those with Massachusetts). Combine this with an election system that allows people to make multiple choices. For instance, let a voter in Spokane WA rank the following choices in their order of preference: 1. stay in WA with Seattle, 2. Become part of a separate, independent state of eastern WA, 3. Become part of a new state that includes eastern WA and OR together, 4. Become part of a new state that includes #3 and the ID panhandle, 5. Join ID.
The fundamental theme is that people in every locality should have the right of self-determination, something that politicians usually seem to sneer at. If voters in Charlotte, NC don't want to be part of that state any more, they shouldn't have to be, and if they can get the counties surrounding them to join them in creating a new state, or just merging with TN or VA, they should have that right. Of course, there are big issues of feasibility which must be considered. But a lot of break-ups wouldn't be that hard to do, such as separating NYC from upstate NY.
>But a lot of break-ups wouldn't be that hard to do, such as separating NYC from upstate NY.
Ideologically NYC should be separate from Upstate New York -- I certainly agree as a liberal minded person living upstate.
However, it's not as easy as you claim, mainly because without the millions of taxpayers in New York City upstate would crumble faster than it already is.
I can only speak to the northern most counties where I grew up and still live, but most of the manufacturing industry has gone and left ghost towns and social difficulties in its wake (unemployment, crime, drug abuse). The biggest industries are healthcare, tourism, and the prisons (which host inmates almost exclusively from the city).
People around here like to cling to their rural red state values and look down upon city liberals, but if all of a sudden that tax support left we would be up shit creek (the Hudson?) without a paddle.
Maybe, but shouldn't the people of upstate NY be allowed to make that decision for themselves? By saying "no", that basically sounds like authoritarianism, that 20M people shouldn't be allowed to decide for themselves what their governance should look like, rightly or wrongly.
Finally, I'm not an upstate NYer, but it's not just some rural area; there's multiple good-sized cities there, including Buffalo, Rochester, and Albany. There's also a lot of farming there; where do you think NYC gets its food? I live down in Virginia now but I frequently get milk from NY. Finally, I think more rural areas might be happier joining forces with other such areas. Perhaps upstate NY would like to join with Vermont, or with part of northern Pennsylvania (including Erie). (Actually, I'm thinking VT, NH, and most of Maine except the part near Boston would be better off joining into a single state, and also taking the eastern sliver of NYS that borders VT.)
People aren't going to change their values if they have someone else's values forced on them from outside; they have to realize their values aren't working and change them willingly. It's just like how Christianity was suppressed in Russia by the Soviets, and then had a huge resurgence after the USSR fell, and now the Russian Orthodox church is a huge force in Russia today. People in these regions are going to cling to their values even more strongly as long as people in the cities force legislation on them that they don't agree with. The answer is to leave them to their own devices and let them fail by themselves.
I wonder what reason the professor gave for splitting up Alaska into 2 states. The new state Seward would probably have something like 50,000 people or less in it.
Yeah, that one doesn't make much sense to me, and seems to go against the goal of equalizing population between states. I guess they thought it had too much land area, but still with so little population, and so little arable land out of that much land, it makes more sense to just leave it a single state. Most of the land in the northern half is just unusable tundra.
If you're that out-of-step with the people around you, you'd be better off just moving, instead of trying to force everyone around you to adopt your mindset. Minorities don't have a right to force their views on the majority, though they do have a right to basic civil rights. But there's only so much change that's feasible: attitudes take generations to change, since you usually have to wait for the people with the wrong attitudes to literally die out.
Also, I'm not saying that eastern Oregonians actually want to join Idaho, I don't know because I don't live in eastern OR. This is just an example. That's why I proposed a referendum with so many different choices: maybe the people there would prefer to join with eastern WA only, and not be part of ID at all.
I would, however, support a tax credit (not deduction) for anyone moving because of redrawn state borders.
> If you're that out-of-step with the people around you, you'd be better off just moving, instead of trying to force everyone around you to adopt your mindset
That's some real victim blaming there. By your logic, if I'm being sexually harassed by my employer I should just change jobs. I shouldn't complain, or try to enact any real, meaningful change and stay in my current job - no, I should voluntarily leave due to their illegal behavior.
I hope you're not a manager or CEO, because frankly your solution to an employee coming to you complaining about discrimination seems to be to just tell them to get another job.
> Minorities don't have a right to force their views on the majority, though they do have a right to basic civil rights
That depends on their views. If your view is backed by the law, then yes, you do have the right to force your view on the majority. I think you have confused the fact the views of many minorities are basic civil rights, like the right to not be discriminated against.
Someone who is trans probably believes they should be treated the same as somebody who is cis. Given that view is enshrined in law, I'm pretty sure they have a right to enforce it on the majority.
> But there's only so much change that's feasible: attitudes take generations to change, since you usually have to wait for the people with the wrong attitudes to literally die out.
Except with your plan, everyone experiencing discrimination has moved away, so these attitudes never die out because there's nobody to correct the behavior in the first place.
> I would, however, support a tax credit (not deduction) for anyone moving because of redrawn state borders
...which would effectively mean the government is subsidizing discrimination. You are bribing minorities to move out of areas discriminating against them, at great cost to them (finding a new job, a new place to live, etc) and at zero cost to those who wanted them out in the first place.
As the employee experiencing the illegal/unethical behavior, you actually would be better off just changing jobs, if you don't have a union or government agency to back you up every moment of the remainder of your career with that company.
It isn't fair, but that's the way it is. If the 800-pound gorilla steals your peanut, you don't fight him for it. You just go find yourself another peanut and eat it more quickly.
Evasion favors the weaker party more than a toe-to-toe, blow-for-blow battle.
It's very difficult to be the minority, no matter where you are, unless you have a synthetic tribe to back you up. You don't have to run away, per se, but you do need to go to ground with your people whenever it becomes necessary. If you don't have enough friends, or the friends you have don't have enough power, you basically have to back down on everything, right or wrong. That's the way the real world works.
You can live in the world that is, and you can dream about the world that you want, but it is unwise to confuse the two.
Depending on what the peanut is, it's probably not good for anyone (including the population at large) for it to be that way. That's why our laws and judicial system should protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
There's only so much social change you can push within a certain timeframe. In case you haven't noticed, there's a huge backlash now against many of the changes you're talking about, especially the whole trans/cis thing. And worse, this is threatening to cause the whole country to turn back to ultra-conservative politics: Ted Cruz is likely to become President, and Republicans have already been sweeping state-level elections. The view that you say is "enshrined in law" is not guaranteed to stay that way, in fact it could very well be overturned soon.
By your logic, people who like marijuana shouldn't move to MJ-friendly states like CO or WA, they should stay where they are and get arrested. Meanwhile, CO and WA are the ones that have actually led the movement to legalize it nationwide by doing it themselves, by thumbing their noses at the federal government, and then proving that not only does it not cause massive crime (since MJ was banned based on the assertion that it causes black men to rape white women), but it also brings in huge tax revenues and massively benefits the economy of the state. Now other states are trying to copy them. According to the logic of federalists like you, these states should never have defied the federal government.
As for changing jobs due to sexual harassment, there's only so much you can do even though it is (rightfully) illegal. If you do get them in trouble for illegal behavior, and then you continue to stay in this job with a sexually harassing manager, exactly how nice of a work environment do you think it's going to be? You don't think they're going to do everything they can to make you miserable? Why kind of masochist would stick around in a place like that?
>I shouldn't complain, or try to enact any real, meaningful change and stay in my current job
Your problem here is that you seem to think that you can actually change peoples' thinking. You can't. You can only punish their bad behavior when it goes over the line. They're still going to hate you and make your life miserable in ways that aren't quite illegal, or can't be proved.
>I hope you're not a manager or CEO, because frankly your solution to an employee coming to you complaining about discrimination seems to be to just tell them to get another job.
This makes no sense: you're talking about a case where you're being sexually harassed by your employer (your words), not by a coworker. If I'm your manager and I'm sexually harassing you, how much good do you think it'll do for you to come to me and complain about it?
It's simple: if you're being harassed by your employer or someone your employer condones, then you gather evidence and file suit, while finding a new job. Expecting evil people to change is silly. However, if it's just some low-level coworker, then still gather your evidence, but if management seems amenable, present it to them because they'll probably investigate and terminate the asshole.
> Minorities don't have a right to force their views on the majority, though they do have a right to basic civil rights.
That will probably be a relevant point in another 200 years when we've addressed the "basic civil rights" thing. As of 2016 it's a bit theoretical still.
Portland doesn't cost nearly as much to live in as the Bay Area.
And you do realize there's other places in the country to live, right? There's tons of moderately-progressive cities across the nation that don't cost that much. Austin is a pretty good example.
The point being that moving is expensive in general. I recently moved back to Portland from the Bay Area for a decent paying tech job, and it still cost me an arm and a leg. A lower cost of living doesn't mean that it's cheap to move.
Also people need to learn to live with minorites and give them rights. Applying radical Wilsonian determination to the US sounds very libertarian.
No, it'll be free to move. Did you miss the part about a tax credit that I proposed?
As for living with minorities, there's only so much you can legislate, and if you push too much, you get a big backlash and the next thing you know, Republicans control both houses of Congress, state legislatures, and Ted Cruz is President.
There's a lot of things people need to do. They need to abandon hip-hop music and religion too, and they also need to build a Moon base, and they really need to build me a giant mansion in Hawaii. I'm going to be waiting around a long time for people to do all these things I think they need to do....
>Applying radical Wilsonian determination to the US sounds very libertarian.
And trying to marginalize people you don't agree with sounds very authoritarian.
For as much as I love the dream of high-speed rail linking our great metropoli, the thought of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build out a network like that is daunting, especially when a flight from BOS to DC already costs $36 and only takes 1½ hrs. Not to mention what autonomous cars might do to the picture.
It seems to me that running the high speed rail through the large cities is a mistake. Run it out in the country and have a branch that runs into/out_of the big cities. That way a train can bypass a city without going into it, the land will cost less, and you can have straighter paths between distant places. Detroit to Florida is a common trip - lots of midwest people vacation down there in the winter. But you can't really take a train today, and this map doesn't really help.
It's the same problem we have with roads. Everything gets built up at the intersections because that has the best access. But then it causes massive congestion at the places that are already a bottleneck. Let's recognize this and not place new infrastructure to do it wrong from the start ;-)
I think all these proposals (and there have been a lot of these) relate back to a central problem in human relationships: Dunbar's Number. Principally, once you are beyond that threshold in terms of politics (and it need not be exclusively people, you could sacrifice some empathy and have families count as units, or even local neighborhoods) your influence on representation dramatically wanes.
Not necessarily because of ill intent, but because you become just another number to whoever "represents" you.
My personal philosophy is that one day we will conclude that the best way to govern is to treat it like we treat most things. Find someone in our community who we think best represents our collective interests, elect them to some council of several neighborhoods, who elect someone from their body to represent the community at the county level, who elects someone to the state level, so on. In practice, I would imagine that each level up you go, the less time you would spend at that level - ie, a national body would behave a lot like how infrequently the UN convenes, and even then it should be mostly to adopt laws from more local governments into the collective one when they have overwhelmingly popular support.
You end up with each layer representing more and more localized interests, and since your base unit of elected official will always be someone elected with social relationships to most / all of their constituents, corruption is much harder to see take root. Have each constituency able to impeach at will, and you can have fairly long or even no term limits, and they will replace bad actors with good ones until they find the best person to represent the majority.
I imagine a system like that would also factor social mobility, it lets you move where the local politics are in your favor and you would see the gradual accumulation of optimal policy where people prosper the most, which would naturally over generations grow in size. At the national level, you can probably use split partitioning of districts and a re-balancing every census to account for these migrations and growths. That means gradually the best communities gain influence over time.
It also has the added benefit of letting everyone cut off higher-tier governance wherever they disagree. You can organize countries based on regional commonality and the borders would be organic with which districts want to participate in which city, or which county, or which state, or which nation. You would almost certainly see similar borders - in the US for example - that these maps demonstrate in the OP because common cultures would align. The only thing missing after that is open borders for migration, so people can freely travel to places whose ideologies align with their own.
I don't know that I'd go as far as you, but I've often thought that, as our population has increased by two orders of magnitude since the founding of the Republic, we ought to add another level of indirection in our government to keep things manageable. Right now we have municipal, state, and federal. Perhaps something like the proposal in the article could be used to introduce a new intermediate level of organization between state and federal.
I know nothing about maps / cartography but why wouldn't they include a section called "the mid west?" It just seems that that is a term that so many people use, at least where I am from.
It's gonna be basically impossible to build a metro-corridor from Albuquerque to Denver. Well I mean, basically impossible unless you're cool with removing several entire mountain ranges.
Yes, that's most certainly true, but that's b/c not so much because of native water (the Rockies trap a lot), but b/c CO sold much of its water to AZ and CA long ago.
It seems to me that the premise of this article is "things have changed economically over the past 50 years, so we should change infrastructure to match". But then what happens in another 50 years when things change again? Wouldn't we be locked into a more rigid infrastructure based on early 21st century economy, and then people in the future will be drawing new maps talking about how "the 7 mega-regions are not serving us well"?
Regardless, it sure would be great if we had a better rail system in the US!
"out that of America’s 350 major metro areas, the cities with more than three million people have rebounded far better from the financial crisis." I assume the writer means metro areas with over 3 million people, but the lack of clarity is confusing at best. Who knows, maybe some readers will assume there are more than 2-3 cities (i.e., not metro areas) in the U.S. with populations of that size.
Considering a growing majority of the population lives in urban areas, it makes perfect sense they should have the power. It is antidemocratic for sparsely populated rural areas to have as much power as they do.
That's actually only true if you count all towns bigger than 2500 people as "urban". That's really not very consistent with what most people think of as "urban" vs "rural". I live in a town of 26,000 people that is very much rural culturally and economically.
This maps illustrates free voluntary association, which is an alternative method of human organisation from central planning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panarchism
Washington, DC is the Northeast now? The whole feeling of the city is a mixture of Northern and Southern culture (or as JFK said somewhat unfairly "a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm")
The ideas in the article won't be politically successful in today's America, because congress and state governments are dominated by conservatives, and conservatives don't believe in infrastructure spending.
The states are small enough that they do need one another right now. If we break it into regions by economics, secession becomes more probable as many could be self-sustaining. A few states are now but the initial setup is a more robust link that occurred more naturally rather than ivory tower (bottom up like everything in nature).
All in all, borders these days are almost immutable, very hard to change.
In that case it would probably be written as North America, South America or The Americas. The single word America is overwhelmingly used to refer to the country amongst English speakers (and even a large number of other languages which have taken "America" as a loan word).
Any plan that puts North Dakota and Minnesota together shows the lack of knowledge of the planner. If everything went to heck, the Red River of the North would be a border.
Nah. I grew up in Fargo and, like everyone in Fargo, spent most of my time aspiring to spend more time in Minnesota and Minneapolis. Both Fargo and Grand Forks — on the border of the state, on the Red — share a ton culturally with Minnesota. If anything, I'd probably split North Dakota in half: east and west, which is growing into more of a divide lately anyway given the Bakken.
It could be that Minnesota doesn't want North Dakota, of course, but tbh Fargo's getting fairly cosmopolitan, surprisingly enough, and is closer to the Cities culturally than most anything else in a few hundred mile radius.
Anyway, this discussion is probably completely irrelevant to about a billion percent of normal Hacker News readers. Gotta represent your people, though. :)
Minnesota and North Dakota are separated by a large number of issues. Minnesota tends to be more in your business such as their restrictive alcohol laws (until 8pm off sale, no sales on Sunday) and politics. Taxes are a world of difference, and the shared culture is not that true. They had very different immigration trends from Europe much less the vast difference from Middle East and Asia.
The Bakkens does change things but the east west probably only exists as a I-29 to I-94 link and giving voting difference isn't even a majority.
Yes, Fargo and Grand Forks tend to look more towards MN (specifically the Twin Cities not MN in general), but they also have a large student population with a large percentage not from ND due to tuition and quality of education (e.g. aviation).
> Anyway, this discussion is probably completely irrelevant to about a billion percent of normal Hacker News readers. Gotta represent your people, though. :)
From the down votes, you are probably right, but judging economic impact via population is really, really dumb as the only metric (you didn't - others did).
I'm sure it's a low percentage who care, but non-zero. I always smile when I see comments by user 'eastdakota' (and wonder why he chose that name): https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eastdakota
Lastly, why do residents of Fargo seem to pay no attention to Winnipeg? I've never heard anyone from the area talk much about driving North for a bit of culture, despite it being a little closer than the Twin Cities.
> Lastly, why do residents of Fargo seem to pay no attention to Winnipeg? I've never heard anyone from the area talk much about driving North for a bit of culture, despite it being a little closer than the Twin Cities.
Its easier to drive to the Twin Cities than Winnipeg (heck its easier to drive to the Twin Cities from Grand Forks) than to cross the border and use different currency. That border crossing is a pain in the rear. I did the crossing before 9/11 and it was a pain then.
I like how the only "midwest" city they list is Minneapolis, which isn't even the capital of Minnesota. Secondly, no cities in North or South Dakota? Some of the most thriving economies are in the Dakotas and have been for the last decade or more.
It just confirms how myopic people who live on the East Coast are about our "flyover" country.
Cities in North and South Dakota are so small, though. I don't see how you could include Sioux Falls or Fargo in a map like this. You'd have to include about twenty cities in Texas. (Des Moines's inclusion is suprising to me, but the Des Moines area has almost as many people as all of North Dakota.)
When you're talking about any sort of economic or tax impact, cities of around 100,000 people are barely a suburb on a map like this. Hell, even after the super-charged growth of the last decade, the combined GDP of North and South Dakota is less than $100 billion. The Minneapolis metro area's GDP is over twice that.
Much of Minneapolis's GDP is based on raw materials out of North and South Dakota (along with rural parts of many other states). Judging economic impact on population is missing a lot of parts of an economy.
I think the guy felt bad that there weren't any big cities in the northern half of the great plains, so he bent the border to get Minneapolis in there.
There's only one nation in the world with "America" in the name.
(As far as I can tell, this whole kerfuffle over the definition of "America" keeps happening because of regional differences in the definitions of continents.)
This idea isn't a new one. I vaguely remember reading such a suggestion in The People's Almanac (I think vol 2), published in 1978. I have it somewhere in my library but I'm on a trip right now so it isn't at hand; I wonder if any other HN reader's have it? It would be interesting to compare previous suggestions for boundary changes to this latest one. Would we find that we needed to change the boundaries every couple of decades? How would that work?
Further, I can't imagine a state like Texas signing up for being split in two. ("Don't Mess With Texas" has been it's anti-litter campaign for 30 years.)
The author neglects entirely the fact that these city-states arose without any central plan to create these economic zones. They are the result of the market and political processes we already had in place. Did some technocrat wizard in Washington say, "We should target the Northeast Corridor to produce 20% of our GDP"? No. That result was organic.
Here's an alternate proposal: decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies. Reduce the federal take of taxes, leaving the money in the hands of the people who actually innovate, employ, and make economic decisions.
The primary fallacies in this central planner's thinking is that some new National Economic Planning Board will be a) completely altruistic in allocating a pile of cash to the places that will produce the most economic benefit, b) able to out-perform the decentralized economic decision-making mechanism of the market (prices), c) not be subject to the lobbying that so corrupts the Congress now.