17 ms·

A New Map for America

• themagician 10y ago
  Everyone would vote for a redrawing. No one would agree to any of the redrawings.
  • basch 10y ago
    the nyt proposal is a weird way to divide up the midwest compared to a dialect map. http://aschmann.net/AmEng/index_collection/AmericanEnglishDialects.png http://aschmann.net/AmEng/index_collection/AmericanEnglishDi... http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2011/humanities/west-coast-speech/ http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2011/humanities/west-coast-sp...
    • ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
      Dialect maps dont necessarily have anything to do with how people live the lives culturally and politically. Seems like a poor option.
      • basch 10y ago
        sure, I wasnt proposing dialect maps as the divider, just that the nyt midwest divide seemed arbitrary.
    • Govannon 10y ago
      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.
    • umanwizard 10y ago
      The data in that first map doesn't match my experience at all. I grew up in Phoenix, and have never met anyone from there who has the pin/pen merger.
    • jessaustin 10y ago
      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.
  • frogpelt 10y ago
    Very few would vote for a redrawing.
  • nugget 10y ago
    Basic income. Give people the means to vote with their feet and then allow them to do so. I hope we live to see it.
• justinph 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Except it's the opposite now- smaller states out punch larger states.
      • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        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 10y ago
          Do large cities really out perform more sparsely populated areas in terms of representatives?
          • douche 10y ago
• ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
  Northern California would be a lot nicer if it were a separate state, formed at the border of Monterey and SLO counties.
  • matt_wulfeck 10y ago
    What you're describing is generally called gerrymandering. It consolidates support bases and causes entrenchment.
    • ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
      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.
  • Grishnakh 10y ago
    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.
    • ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
      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 http://imgur.com/fF5SZYJ
    • 10y ago
• Grishnakh 10y ago
  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.
  • ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
    What about a queer person in Eastern Oregon who wants Oregons more progressive laws, rather than living under Idahos?
• Retric 10y ago
  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.
• mrcactu5 10y ago
  Here is a map of the US according the distance to major cities. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2626281/The-maps-MATHS-Borders-redrawn-using-algorithms-relating-distance-cities-not-politics.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2626281/The-m... 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_apportionment#Constitutional_texts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap... 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.
  • stronglikedan 10y ago
    Pedantic, but should be "capital cities", instead of "major cities".
    • npizzolato 10y ago
      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). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
  • infogulch 10y ago
    Was that first map calculated on a GPU?
  • jbattle 10y ago
• flavor8 10y ago
  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/features/upinarms-map-large.jpg http://emerald.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/images/fea... It's a great read.
  • remarkEon 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Y'all are most definitely yankees -- I can tell because by default, your tea isn't sweetened.
      • samcheng 10y ago
        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.
        • deleted 10y ago
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        • 10y ago
• zanny 10y ago
  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.
  • 10y ago
• oblio 10y ago
  I find it funny that most of these proposals completely ignore US territories. Those people are truly second hand US citizens.
  • wcameron 10y ago
    Not even just territories but two entire states.
    • heartbreak 10y ago
      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.
  • Grishnakh 10y ago
    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.
• mmanfrin 10y ago
  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-whom-do-you-hang-with-map-of-america http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/04/16/177512687/a-...
• chinathrow 10y ago
  I love newly thinked maps - but I don't like borders.
• lbaskin 10y ago
  "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.
• powera 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• lbaskin 10y ago
  "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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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.
        • 10y ago
• clarkmoody 10y ago
  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.
  • enraged_camel 10y ago
    >>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)?
    • TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      It sounds like perhaps the default mental map needs to be updated before it's possible to improve the physical map.
  • metaphorm 10y ago
    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.
• garou 10y ago
  I clicked expecting the map of America, not USA.
  • carlosfvp 10y ago
    +1
  • PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    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.)
• jordanlev 10y 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!
• protomyth 10y ago
  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.
  • at-fates-hands 10y ago
    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.
    • jtbigwoo 10y ago
      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.
      • protomyth 10y ago
        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.
  • jtbigwoo 10y ago
    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.
  • holman 10y ago
• msane 10y ago
  United we stand, divided we fall.
  • drawkbox 10y ago
    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.
• samcheng 10y ago
  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/Content?oid=19813 http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-urban-archipelago/Con...
• gshubert17 10y ago
  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-borders-need-to-be-redrawn/nine-nations-of-north-america-30-years-later http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/03/where-do-bor... It also ignores state boundaries, but includes Canada and parts of Mexico and the Caribbean.
  • Laforet 10y ago
    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.
  • huherto 10y ago
    This one includes northern Mexico and Canada. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/which-of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/w...
• Avshalom 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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.
• miracle_code 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Oh, you'd feel safer if the most insular, xenophobic parts of the US had direct control over their own nuclear arsenal?
    • informer2 10y ago
      This would speed up the process, wouldn't it?
• e0m 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      May be the cars will travel very close taking advantage of drafting. Like trains on the highway.
• nxzero 10y ago
  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/Cartlinearlarge.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Cartline...
• hendler 10y ago
  This looks like a map of Hyperloop stations.
• ausjke 10y ago
  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.
• vph 10y ago
  To be fair, author should stick "Great" in front of each region.
• aggieben 10y ago
  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.
  • pnathan 10y ago
    Considering that economic and political power is accruing to big urban centers, it will happen anyway.
  • dublinben 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
• brockers 10y ago
  Thank god we have this article from the New York Times to tell the rest of the country how we should be organizing ourselves.
• padobson 10y ago
  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/republican_vote_count.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/repub...
  • rjbwork 10y ago
    Favoring dense, highly productive, urban areas shouldn't be a surprise considering the author is Singaporean...
  • serge2k 10y ago
    > 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.
  • dublinben 10y ago
• BorisMelnik 10y ago
  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.
• oldgun 10y ago
  Couldn't help but... http://9gag.com/gag/a2mjvWe http://9gag.com/gag/a2mjvWe
• woodandsteel 10y ago
  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.
• gosukiwi 10y ago
  For some reason I thought it was a map for the whole continent :-)
  • xiaoma 10y ago
    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).
• phkahler 10y ago
  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 ;-)
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• todd8 10y ago
  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.)
• emdd 10y ago
  Part of Minnesota really belongs to The Great Lakes--the eastern half isn't very "Midwest/Great Plains".
• em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
  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 10y ago
  Old but maybe still relevant: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_end_of_america.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_end_of_a...
• known 10y ago
  Capitalism != Globalization
• hownottowrite 10y ago
  About the author: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parag_Khanna https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parag_Khanna
• jhbadger 10y ago
  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")
• wmccullough 10y ago
  This map assumes, such as in the case of the southeast, that urban centers never change.
• jessaustin 10y ago
  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.
• pc2g4d 10y ago
  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.