
A New Map for America - thisjustinm
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-for-america.html
======
clarkmoody
The fantasies of central planners never end.

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.

~~~
matthewowen
>> decentralize power back to the states

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.

~~~
caseysoftware
> 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?

~~~
bsder
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.

~~~
jholman
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.

------
lbaskin
"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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy)

(edited to correct a typo)

~~~
vkou
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.

~~~
bhauer
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.

~~~
zymhan
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.

~~~
bhauer
> _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.

~~~
drewcrawford
> 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.

------
mrcactu5
Here is a map of the US according the distance to major cities.
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2626281/The-m...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2626281/The-
maps-MATHS-Borders-redrawn-using-algorithms-relating-distance-cities-not-
politics.html)

Electoral college reform (fifty states with equal population)
[http://fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/](http://fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/)

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".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment#Constitutional_texts)

    
    
        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.

~~~
dmlorenzetti
_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.)

~~~
kuschku
There actually is a way to get both: representatives for each geographical
area, and a fair representation.

With mixed-member proportional voting, you have two votes, one for the local
representative, one for the perceptual representation.

------
flavor8
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...](http://emerald.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/images/features/upinarms-
map-large.jpg)

It's a great read.

~~~
remarkEon
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.

~~~
stray
Y'all are most definitely yankees -- I can tell because by default, your tea
isn't sweetened.

~~~
samcheng
I think of Yankee as 'puritanical English' whereas Wisconsin and Minnesota are
mostly 'German and Northern European protestants.'

Growing up in Milwaukee, I didn't know anyone who drank tea, outside of
occasional yum cha (dim sum) in Chicago. We drank beer instead.

~~~
chezhead
You're the first person I've seen on here mention they are from Milwaukee!

------
padobson
_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.

Power to the people.

[1][http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/repub...](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/republican_vote_count.html)

~~~
spankalee
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.

~~~
jchendy
I thought OP's comment was in agreement with the snippet he posted.

------
themagician
Everyone would vote for a redrawing. No one would agree to any of the
redrawings.

~~~
basch
the nyt proposal is a weird way to divide up the midwest compared to a dialect
map.

[http://aschmann.net/AmEng/index_collection/AmericanEnglishDi...](http://aschmann.net/AmEng/index_collection/AmericanEnglishDialects.png)

[http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2011/humanities/west-coast-
sp...](http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2011/humanities/west-coast-speech/)

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Dialect maps dont necessarily have anything to do with how people live the
lives culturally and politically. Seems like a poor option.

~~~
basch
sure, I wasnt proposing dialect maps as the divider, just that the nyt midwest
divide seemed arbitrary.

------
Retric
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.

------
gshubert17
Reminds me of Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America (1981) about which
he commented 3 decades later:

[http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/03/where-do-
bor...](http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/03/where-do-borders-need-
to-be-redrawn/nine-nations-of-north-america-30-years-later)

It also ignores state boundaries, but includes Canada and parts of Mexico and
the Caribbean.

~~~
Laforet
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.

------
mmanfrin
One of my favorite drawing-up of America is based on data from Where's George:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/04/16/177512687/a-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/04/16/177512687/a-whom-
do-you-hang-with-map-of-america)

------
justinph
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.

~~~
douche
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.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Except it's the opposite now- smaller states out punch larger states.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
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.)

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Do large cities really out perform more sparsely populated areas in terms of
representatives?

~~~
douche
NY City has more than half of the congressional districts allotted to NY
state, so yes.

------
brockers
Thank god we have this article from the New York Times to tell the rest of the
country how we should be organizing ourselves.

------
powera
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.

~~~
jqm
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.

------
oblio
I find it funny that most of these proposals completely ignore US territories.
Those people are truly second hand US citizens.

~~~
wcameron
Not even just territories but two entire states.

~~~
heartbreak
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.

------
ZanyProgrammer
Northern California would be a lot nicer if it were a separate state, formed
at the border of Monterey and SLO counties.

~~~
Grishnakh
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.

~~~
askldfhjkasfhd
San Francisco, by itself, has a population of 864,816. The state of Wyoming,
in its entirety, has 586,107 residents.

~~~
Grishnakh
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.

~~~
beatpanda
The State of Jefferson is alive and well, according to a surprisingly large
number of billboards in my home town.

~~~
thrownaway2424
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.

~~~
Grishnakh
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.

------
pc2g4d
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.

------
nxzero
America should just be honest, city and non-city areas should be divide and
run independently as two populations.

Map showing what America really looks like:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Cartline...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Cartlinearlarge.png)

------
ausjke
Check out the speedy railway system that is in China now:

[http://crh.gaotie.cn/CRHMAP.html](http://crh.gaotie.cn/CRHMAP.html)

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.

------
Grishnakh
I've long advocated redrawing state borders, similar to how they're shown in
[http://www.tjc.com/38states/](http://www.tjc.com/38states/)

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.

~~~
fluxquanta
>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.

~~~
Grishnakh
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.

------
e0m
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.

~~~
pnut
Yep, pretty much. As a die-hard train lover, I've moved on to autonomous cars
as the hope for civilized travel in the future.

Like a tiny train that takes you wherever you want to go. Plus, the era of
public spending on public good in the US is over.

~~~
huherto
May be the cars will travel very close taking advantage of drafting. Like
trains on the highway.

------
phkahler
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 ;-)

------
zanny
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.

~~~
sevensor
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.

------
BorisMelnik
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.

------
Avshalom
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.

~~~
seehafer
Umm... Except for la veta pass Interstate 25 runs east of the Rockies from
Denver to Albuquerue. More possible than you think.

Denver to SLC, on the other hand, you'd be 100% correct about.

~~~
justinator
There's also Raton Pass, which is nothing to sneeze at.

A big problem of an urban corridor for CO Springs to ABQ is that of not enough
water to prop up an exploding population.

~~~
seehafer
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.

------
jordanlev
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!

------
lbaskin
"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.

------
aggieben
I think I can summarize the OP thusly: "All economic and political powers
should be in the service of the interests of big urban centers".

No thanks.

~~~
dublinben
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.

~~~
aggieben
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.

------
samcheng
This is a rehash of the (excellent!) Urban Archipelago manifesto from the
Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger in 2004:

[http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-urban-
archipelago/Con...](http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-urban-
archipelago/Content?oid=19813)

------
em3rgent0rdr
This maps illustrates free voluntary association, which is an alternative
method of human organisation from central planning.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panarchism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panarchism)

------
mirimir
Old but maybe still relevant:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_end_of_a...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_end_of_america.html)

------
jhbadger
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")

------
woodandsteel
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.

------
vph
To be fair, author should stick "Great" in front of each region.

------
hownottowrite
About the author:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parag_Khanna](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parag_Khanna)

------
jessaustin
It's a little weird that the borders of Arkansas are the only ones preserved
in this map. There's no great cultural or economic divide there.

------
oldgun
Couldn't help but...

[http://9gag.com/gag/a2mjvWe](http://9gag.com/gag/a2mjvWe)

------
emdd
Part of Minnesota really belongs to The Great Lakes--the eastern half isn't
very "Midwest/Great Plains".

------
wmccullough
This map assumes, such as in the case of the southeast, that urban centers
never change.

------
msane
United we stand, divided we fall.

~~~
drawkbox
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.

------
gosukiwi
For some reason I thought it was a map for the whole continent :-)

~~~
xiaoma
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).

------
protomyth
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.

~~~
holman
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. :)

~~~
nkurz
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eastdakota)

You're probably aware (but others may not be) that the East Dakota / West
Dakota proposal has a long history: [http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/609-had-
the-cookie-crumbled...](http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/609-had-the-cookie-
crumbled-differently-east-and-west-dakota)

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.

~~~
protomyth
> 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.

------
hendler
This looks like a map of Hyperloop stations.

------
known
Capitalism != Globalization

------
chinathrow
I love newly thinked maps - but I don't like borders.

------
garou
I clicked expecting the map of America, not USA.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
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.)

------
miracle_code
US of A, we all would be better off if this concept would die.

Split up into smaller, independent nations, don't terrorize the world with
your armsdealing presidents wanting to achieve "democrazy".

Don't spy on its citizens as well as the rest of mankind.

Don't poison our food via tradedeals negociated in secret with global
consorts.

Don't murder our leaders, only wanting to be free from you.

Please die.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Oh, you'd feel safer if the most insular, xenophobic parts of the US had
direct control over their own nuclear arsenal?

~~~
informer2
This would speed up the process, wouldn't it?

------
todd8
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.)

