
Ask HN: Would Americans be happier if the US was several independent countries? - alando46
Interested in hearing perspectives from the HN community.
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DanielBMarkham
Note that you would achieve the same thing by pushing more power back to the
states. This is the way the country was designed -- citizens retain most all
of the power. They give some of that power to their state. Their state then
gives some of _that_ power to the nation. The nation ensures free trade among
the states, defends against any foreign enemies, and provides basic nation-
keeping duties: border, customs, etc. (One might even imagine addressing
pollution and other externalities issues as being in the basic nation-building
category)

My answer is yes. The more we centralize powers that used to be local, the
more we end up in this winner-take-all thing we have going on, where rules are
made in a one-sized-fits all manner. That's bad for a multitude of reasons. As
much as possible, distributed, self-optimizing systems out perform command-
and-control systems. (But not always. When that paradigm doesn't work, the
fallback should always be a federated, staggered and layered system)

~~~
alando46
Is there any historical evidence suggesting that democracy can make enough
people happy enough (to justify the pains of political negotiations) at the
size/scale of the U.S?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
No there isn't.

Note that true democracy begins failing as soon as you begin leaving a small
social group. By the time you get to the Dunbar Number, it's already failed
and you have to move to some kind of representative system.

Even representative systems fail, however, and for the same reason: human
social interactions don't scale. So you might get to a Dunbar Number squared
level, and decrease the feedback time, and make it work up to half a million
or so.

That's city or borough sized. From that point outwards it's just partisan
power plays -- then you're really looking at how organized groups act -- which
is a good reason to limit power more and more the larger the scale.

------
tabeth
The general form of this question (are people happier if they're in smaller
communities) inspired this other post of mine [0]. As far as the answer: the
short answer is yes. The long answer is, "it depends" [1]. Personally, I
believe the ideal community size is 100 - 1000 people. One where you know at
least intimately 10% [2] of the population and have hard of 100%. I also think
a small community is ideal for proper implementation of democracy. Mainly
because it's easier to ensure education parity in a small population, meaning
the democratic process is fairer.

My tangent aside, to answer your question, I think it would be no. Any
happiness increase of the people living in the new United State(s) will surely
be negated by the huge pain and suffering required to create them. If you
discount that, the answer to that is also probably yes.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13468508](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13468508)

[1] [http://www.citylab.com/design/2011/10/urban-rural-
happiness-...](http://www.citylab.com/design/2011/10/urban-rural-happiness-
debate/290/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number)

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MK999
If you divide the US into smaller pieces, there would still be a need to merge
the resources to maintain the military supremacy (to compete with
China/Russia) and then you very well might have your military-industrial-
complex running the place.

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gotofritz
If they could live side by side in peace perhaps, but I doubt they could.

