US states: If they were countries | Hacker News Reader

US states: If they were countries

economist.com

114 pointstimr66 comments

California needs to be two states: Northern CA and Southern CA. It doesn't make sense for one state to have so much oomph, but to be such a disaster, financially.

Northern CA and Southern CA are completely different worlds; they have different agendas and different kinds of people flock to each one for different reasons.

State taxes, government latency, budgeting. . . all of these things could be simplified and improved if the state were not such a behemoth.

Where would you draw the line though? How would you resolve the water that gets shipped down to southern California?

Have a war. Whoever loses has to keep Fresno.

Disclaimer: I got this silly idea from someone else, but I don't remember who or where.

all of these things could be simplified and improved if the state were not such a behemoth

I'm skeptical of that. And since most states are in the same financial mess as CA, only on smaller scales, the argument that splitting the state up will somehow improve things seems weak.

The state is too big to manage doing what state governments were originally designed to manage. Because CA is such a large stage geographically and population-wise, and economically it has too much on its plate for one government to handle. It cannot even begin to sort its priorities, let alone get working on solving the top ones.

Splitting the state would at the very least revive the local / participatory / "community organizer" role of people with respect to their government. When people are involved in their governments, their governments improve. Simple as that; I don't see how it wouldn't improve many areas that CA hasn't been able to manage for decades now.

I'm not convinced you've thought this through properly. Beyond what geographic size, population count, and economic size does a state need to be split? And how do you know how many states it should be split into? I mean, Rome essentially split in half and ended up with two unmanageable nations. How do you know California doesn't need to be split into 3 or 4 states? Or for that matter, more states have more overhead (you need two legislatures, two cabinets, two of every cabinet position). How do you know the real solution isn't to combine California with Oregon and Washington?

    Because CA is such a large stage geographically and
    population-wise

Canada doesn't seem to have any of these problems despite having about the same population and far vaster land. Western Australia gets along fine. Sweden? Norway? Finland? Chile?

The lower ratio of geographic area to population in California compared to something like Norway should make it easier to run California than others because the ration of taxpayers to infrastructure is better.

    When people are involved in their governments,
    their governments improve

This is popular wisdom, but I disagree. That dynamic attracts different people, but a common stereotype is a divisive, intrusive egootist with grand plans. That dynamic forces good, middle of the road citizens into political participation just to avoid being overrun by the determined nutters. High participation of involvement is definitely not a prerequisite for a nice, functioning state.

I don't see evidence indicating to believe that it could have worked if the state was larger or smaller.

Most states have some sort of financial mess, but CA is one of the worst. (NJ and Illinois have it beat, however.)

http://blogs.sacbee.com/the-public-eye/2010/06/californias-b...

I completely agree, and wrote at length about this topic in December:

http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2010/12/07/californi...

Many states have groups that want their state to be divided into two or more states; you just hear about California more in the news because they're bigger. One less prominent example is eastern vs. western Washington, where the farmers in the east feel dominated by the liberals in Seattle; I believe they even voted on it in the past. If we divide up states into homogeneous sections, pretty soon every neighborhood will be its own state.

(Edit: Apparently it's so common there's a Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_partition_pr...)

>Many states have groups that want their state to be divided into two or more states; you just hear about California more in the news because they're bigger.

Perhaps we should split the cries for California to be separated into two groups - arguments for it from northern Californians and arguments for it from Southern Californians.

I'm kidding, of course, but I think that what you say vaguely supports shawnee_'s point.

"If we divide up states into homogeneous sections, pretty soon every neighborhood will be its own state."

Some science fiction writers have hypothesized about this for a while. Technology is trending towards empowering ever smaller groups to manage their affairs quite effectively, and enabling those groups to rapidly snap together with other groups on an as-needed basis. It isn't that hard to look out 50-100 years hence and ask what all these massive centralized governments are really doing for us that couldn't be done by much finer-grained bands of smaller ones. (Don't think something like every county fully a nation in the modern sense, think something more like the relation of states to the federal government, and counties doing things like perhaps buying into pre-existing health care plans or something, across a wide array of such issues.) There are days when the US government's current trend toward centralization seems downright anachronistic to me.

I recall one science fiction story in Analog where after significant advances in nanotechnology, the minimum self-sustaining unit of civilization became a single house. It was literally possible to seal off a suburban house plot and it could survive solely on the incoming solar energy and the technologies it had. After the homeowner got in some trouble with the local law enforcement, he has the bright idea of simply seceding from the nation, though various legal handwavery and appeals to the ancient question of the social contract. It was one of those interesting, thought-provoking stories that at least made me think. Yes, I am well aware of the other tradeoffs involved and how important defense and preventing the tragedy of the commons is, the point is not that this is obviously a good idea, the point is that it is not unthinkable that we may indeed be trending towards smaller polities in the future. The outcome of the battle between centralization and decentralization haven't been written yet.

One of the core ideas of Mao in the mid-20th century was to divide China into completely self-sufficient entities of about 3 mln. people, who should produce EVERYTHING without any trade whatsoever - because trade breeds wealth, which breeds inequality. They were supposed to mine their own iron and smelt their own steel from their own territory, for example.

Unsurprisingly, didn't work too well.

>Unsurprisingly, didn't work too well.

I find I cannot pidginhole this statement in an easy anti-communism idiom. While it may be addressing the failures of communism (read centralized planning), it actually holds rather well on a long view historical suggestion. Mao was talking about peasant-farmer communities, and ones of around three million people, with strategically divided borders, could easily continue their existence at a turn of the century (for North America) standard of living.

Just saying, there's nothing structurally wrong with the idea.

Back in the heady days of secession, the mayor of New York suggested that it could become an independent state, along the lines of the old Hanseatic cities. That didn't work out, and eventually he decided he was a uniter, not a divider, and helped created the 5-borough city of today.

(edit: spelling)

I've lived in Washington for about eight years, now, and I'm tired of people east of the Cascades bleating about how Western Washingtonians have the East under our thumb.

The people in the Eastern part of the state are more than welcome to split off if they want to, seeing how us Seattle liberals underwrite their existence (cf. http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/01/25/since-r..., http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/01/25/welfare..., and http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/01/27/6495426...)

The tl; dr version is that King county taxpayers (which includes Seattle) receive $0.62 back in benefits for every dollar they pay to the state, whereas people in Republican-leaning counties (i.e the eastern part of the state) get back an average of $1.40 for every buck they kick into state coffers.

You have a rather simplified picture of things.

A good bit of that extra money Eastern Washington gets back goes towards things like maintaining irrigation canals that make it possible for farmers to grow food for the rest of the state. Some of it goes towards maintaining the dams that provide a lot of power to the state. And some of it goes towards cleaning up Hanford - the federal government hasn't picked up the entire tab for that, even though it should. Some of it goes towards education, of course. --Let's be honest, agriculture has brought a lot of immigrants to that side of the State, and the Pasco School District, for example, has the highest percentage of ESL students than any other school district in the state.

Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with the political leanings of much of Eastern Washington, and even now I have no desire to ever move back there, but having grown up there, I can certainly attest to the fact that things are much more complex than you seem to believe.

Could you explain to someone completely unfamilliar with the internal economies of Washington state why the western portion of the state is forced to buy food from the western portion, or why it couldn't buy the electricity from a separate state of Eastern Washinton? The regional issues such as education and the Hanford site...are regional issues, if I'm not putting too sharp a realpolitc edge on my examination.

I've seen a proposal to throw out all the existing states, and partition the US into several regions, where if two areas were adjacent and were similar geographically, agriculturally, and economically, they would be in the same region. Boundaries would thus tend to be along things like mountain ranges, major bodies of water, and the like.

I have been unable to find this proposal via Google. I seem to recall it had around a dozen regions, or maybe twice that.

I tend to like these divisions and their respective names: http://www.tjc.com/38states/38states.jpg

New York, too, has a divide between the Southern ("downstate") area of the state (New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area) and the Northern ("upstate," though this is sometimes used as a casual description of any place north of where one is). The two have different priorities for funding (the south needs transit subsidies, the north agricultural ones) and very little compromise (nor between parties). There are many parts of upstate New York that are closer to Boston than The City and root for the Red Socks.

The once and present (or is it once and future?) governor's father made that proposal 40 years ago...

Why stop there? I live in the Mission in San Francisco. It's a completely different world from The Haight. Why not split the Haight and the Mission into different states? After all, smaller states are easier to manage, right?

Besides that, I'm not convinced that smaller states are the answer. We could very well end up with two states who have a budget deficit that adds up to California's.

San Francisco and Los Angeles have far more in common with each other than either does with Fresno, or Bakersfield, or the far north like Yreka.

Ah, the premise of http://www.urbanarchipelago.com/, a stirring response to the backwards hellhole that seems to surround anywhere I'd want to live.

Wow. There is some intense vitriol in that link. Disagreeing with ideas is one thing, but demonizing people who thing differently is not healthy political discourse. Of course, maybe that is not the purpose of this article.

For some context, that was an alt-weekly editorial written immediately after the red states knowingly re-elected Bush. The cover led with "DO NOT DESPAIR": http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/CoverArt?oid=19811&ye...

I wouldn't know whether it's good political strategy, but I found it comforting at the time.

So true, instead of North and South California, we need an East and West. The coast is liberal, the inland conservative.

NorCal would get the worse deal, as it would be stuck with the huge and mostly economically useless part of the state between Oregon and Napa/Sonoma. In addition to the entertainment industry, SoCal would get all the farms and oil fields.

A better option for California would be to secede from the rest of the United States. California could cut taxes and afford to pay its public service workers their inflated salaries (and then some), if it wasn't bailing out the rest of the country to the tune of $50B each year.

Whenever I see comments to this effect, I always wonder if people are familiar with their history.

Note, I'm not accusing you of this, just saying it makes me wonder. Silicon Valley, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Fairchild Semiconductor..HP..all these things were funded with federal defense money way back in the day. Just saying Ca may be "bailing out" the rest of the country, but the rest of the country invested a great deal in Ca as well.

Don't get me wrong - I love this place and see where you're coming from.

My assumption is that California has been a donor state for much of its history, so much of that defense money "invested" in California was probably Californian tax money to begin with.

> A better option for California would be to secede from the rest of the United States. California could cut taxes and afford to pay its public service workers their inflated salaries (and then some), if it wasn't bailing out the rest of the country to the tune of $50B each year.

Some states that paid more in federal taxes than they saw returned to them in federal spending have tried this before. It didn't exactly work out. (Of course circumstances are different now, in that it's the urbanized states on the losing side of the deal, plus there isn't a massive human-rights issue alongside the economic disparity.)

Northern California has the water.

Northern CA and Southern CA are completely different worlds; they have different agendas and different kinds of people flock to each one for different reasons

I have lived in SF and LA (as well as SD and some other spots) and completely disagree. The metro areas of SF and LA are nearly identical.

Generally the people who have this viewpoint are people from northern California who for some irrational, childish reason hate southern California.

West LA/SF East LA/Oakland Montana St./Fillmore St. Silverlake/Mission Palisades/Marin Inland Empire/East Bay Pasadena/Walnut Creek Ventura & SB Counties / South Bay & Peninsula Counties

This list goes on. It's practically a mirror image.

I grew up in SF, but I've spent a lot of time living in SoCal as well. I can't stand the kneejerk anti-socal mentality you sometimes find up north either (1). It seems to mainly be a mentality of northerners (though when I lived in LA, the LATimes did take the occasional potshot at the "boutique empire of san francisco", some of which were kind of amusing). The whole thing seems to be fading, though. There isn't nearly as much of a north/south gap as there used to be - now, the political rivalries in California tend to be more coastal/insland. Plus, LA has become far more urban in the last 20 years than it used to be.

That said, I think you go too far in attributing this viewpoint to an irrational hatred of socal. I really like LA, and I just don't think you can find an equivalent of LA's beach towns (I'm thinking particularly of Manhattan, Hermosa, Santa Monica, or Venice) in San Francisco (including Santa Cruz, which I also like but has a very different vibe).

You definitely lined up some similar areas. But a mirror image? No way, that's going way too far.

(1) Some of this has its origins in the "water wars" of the mid 1970s.

I feel like the secession/partition ideas you most frequently hear floated in the last 10 years or so are in a lot of ways the misguided desire to hold constitutional conventions. Splitting up gives you the chance to do that 'reset' and fix a lot of institutional problems that seem daunting otherwise, but you have the opportunity for the same 'reset' with a convention, although there's nothing to keep a convention from making it even worse.

The same can be said of many, most, or maybe even all countries.

I'd like to see a graph with per capita numbers now.

On a per capita basis, California does slightly better than the US at large: about $50.8K vs. $47k US (according to the CIA/IMF):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...

We're still waiting for a porn star to run for California's highest office. In the meantime, Italy owns the headlines.

Actually, a porn star did run. But was beat by Schwarzenegger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Carey_(pornographic_actres...

Huh, I never imagined Italy was that rich ... then again, FIAT does own half the motoring world.

Italy's population is over 50% more than California's.

Yes but California is an example of very rich state per number of inhabitants of a vast county like US. For instance in Italy the distribution of richness is also very unevenly distributed, with a few of the north regions accounting for a vast amount of the whole richness. In this regions probably the richness per inhabitant is comparable to the one of California, or possibly even more.

For instance the region of Lombardia alone has 248,119 million euros GDP, that is 25,251 per inhabitant.

Aren't they tiny? (As a landmass. Not the people themselves.)

The area of Italy is 301,338 km2, the area of California is 423,970 km2

According to a list of US States by size (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territo...) Italy is larger than all but four US states (Alaska, Texas, California and Montana).

A lot of desirable brands are Italian - Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo, Ducati, Moto Guzzi, Aprilia, Armani, Diesel, Maserati, Ermenegildo Zegna...

Not to mention food, wine, tourism...

And that's just stuff that I can think of - they also export things like high speed trains etc.

West Virginia = Iraq.

What can we say about that?

All I can say is it is a good thing they separated New Zealand and Australia!

We can say that there are sixteen times as many people in Iraq as in West Virginia.

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brudgers of Alabama=Nigeria

FYI there is an interactive version, which also includes population:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/comparing_...

It would be nice if the states were permitted to run their states as if countries, without the incessant interference of the federal government.

That was basically the original conceptualization. It didn't work too well and was modified. IIRC, that political configuration has a history of failure whenever tried. (Maybe someone who is more of student of political history can elaborate. Not my strong point.)

What makes you say it was modified because "it didn't work too well," and what does that even mean?

Presuming your question wasn't rhetorical:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shay%27s_Rebellion#Consequences

I'd say power centralised at the Federal Government because that's what power tends to do -- it tends to centralise.

Those who have more power tend to find ways to use that power to (always with the very best of intentions) to obtain more power. Whenever the Federal and State governments argue about who has a certain power it always winds up looking like a wolf and a chicken arguing about what's for dinner.

Power does not always centralize. For instance the long-term trend in Canada has been towards decentralization. According to the Constitution there are many things that the federal government has sole responsibility for that in practice have been moved to the provincial level (with the blessing of the federal government).

As I said: I am not much of a student of political history. But my general understanding is that the very name "United States of America" came from the idea that these would be separate "states" -- nations -- that would band together for certain specific purposes, like defense, but would otherwise operate independently. The problem came in that the Federal government had insufficient power to raise money (or an army) to perform defense. More power had to be ceded to the Federal government in order to ensure that the entire thing didn't simply fall apart. As a young nation, newly separated from England by force, the US was quite vulnerable. Had the Federal government remained hamstrung in its ability to raise money and raise an army, this country likely wouldn't have survived for long.

Due to the intrinsic cultural diversity, each State cannot productively govern more than 2 million citizens. We should decentralize the World into States or Cantons as in Switzerland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switzerland

I love this work. It would be nice if there was some representation of the similar country area - kinda like a cartogram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram)

I would be interested in seeing a similar map based on GDP per capita.

Come on, three Finlands? Take a number, folks.

Might be a reference to the Monty Python's Finland song, or just coincidence.

Poor Washington got Greece

Where's China?

No single US state has a GDP equal to China. You would have to combine multiple states to equal the GDP of China.

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