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Comment by saraid216 | Hacker News Reader

> The result of this isn't a utopia of good government and sound policy, it's an orgy of hyper-localism.

Any chance someone could make this statement more concrete? It's terribly important to his argument, but it's taken as an article of faith.

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Because you're only beholden to the people who live in your ward, you only really have the interests of those specific 10-50 thousand people (less in smaller cities, more in larger ones) in mind.

This, it turns out, really harms the capacity for governments to make decisions that make everyone better off on average but might make any given small region of people unhappy (say, by building a powerplant or a garbage dump).

Of course, there are benefits to this kind of representation, and some kind of mix is always desirable - but the gist of it is people are more willing to make regionally-disinterested decisions if their interests are aligned across ideological rather than geographical lines.

"This, it turns out, really harms the capacity for governments to make decisions that make everyone better off on average but might make any given small region of people unhappy (say, by building a powerplant or a garbage dump)."

Can you explain why? I don't understand this. I would have thought that, for example, given a country of 50 districts, and the decision is being made "shall we build this dump in district 1", you'll get 49 voting yes and the representative of district 1 voting no.

But District 1's representative is chair of a committee you need to sweet talk in two months, and is maybe a tie-breaking vote for that other thing you want.

I'm not sure that was the best example. If you're talking about NIMBYism, there's generally some sort of veto power or capacity to obstruct involved.

The Congressional equivalent would be earmarks and pork. Not that we don't have quite enough of that already but the argument is that absent larger, more ideological themes and the parties' whips, it would be just about all we would have.

I would strongly recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Rationality-Power-Democracy-Practice-M...

It's a case study of power dynamics inside the city of Aalborg with respect to a specific project and shows the influences of counties, businesses, and political climate on the result.

Not sure why Amazon doesn't seem to have it anymore... :(

The other argument for this is that the ability to have better control of your immediate community/district is really useful in avoiding or stopping decisions that can destroy or permanently harm those neighborhoods. Local politics reflects really well the kind of struggles localities and communities go through, even if sometimes NIMBY kicks in and leaves everyone worse off.

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