7 ms·

The opposition of those two choices underscores how bizarre American regional divisions are. The Boston area covers parts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New

The opposition of those two choices underscores how bizarre American regional divisions are. The Boston area covers parts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire and all of Rhode Island. Rather than attempting to improve the entire region, the available options are zero-sum: RI would cannibalize the business or income tax base of other parts of the Boston area. This, in turn, encourages the MA and CT governments to do what they can to recover that loss. If there were one regional government, that could be avoided by focusing decisions about infrastructure, housing, services, and taxation on the actual region's health.

niftich 10y ago
You're not wrong, but this doesn't just happen in America, and it doesn't just happen at the city, county, or state level. There are entire countries or overseas departments of countries that cannibalize tax bases of others, some in corporate taxes, some in personal taxes. There are countries that, due to low wages, low cost of living, and low worker protections, can manufacture certain goods really cheap. There are countries that can ruin their countryside extracting resources like copper, rare earth metals, or oil and sell it internationally. Ultimately regardless of what the territorial unit, each unit looks out for their self-interest, because a 'Unified Greater Boston' may result in more growth, but it will likely come with a different allocation on wealth to the particular area that each fiefdom covers. It's really just capitalism where each entity competes with another, and some win really big, while most don't.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- __derek__ 10y ago
  No, it's not a uniquely American phenomenon, but that's the example at hand and the one that I'm most familiar with.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  As an example of a better situation, London covers the cities and many smaller towns and suburbs, which each have their own local government. The local areas are responsible for schools, waste, most planning etc. But it's all unified under the Greater London Authority, which controls transport and policing. This is what the Mayor of London controls, as head of the elected London Assembly.
  - chillydawg 10y ago
    Except the City Of London, which refuses to cede some 1000 year old power it extorted from some king or other.
em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_divided_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_divided_cities
- __derek__ 10y ago
  As it happens, I grew up in one.
chrismcb 10y ago
This problem isn't unique to am America, and the problem will never really go away. Regions change and they grow. What happens when your Boston region starts to conflict with the NYC region?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  There are models of urban influence based on analogues of gravitational attraction (they're actually called that, see: http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa031601a.htm http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa031601a.htm). For any two given urban areas, their relationship is likely to be eitheras peers, that is, one competes with another (for labour, capital, and foreign trade), or as distinct members of a regional hierarchy (e.g., commuter suburb and commercial hub). And yes, depending on how you scope out regions, they may have different comparable roles. Note too that two suburbs within a given hierarchical region, say, Silver Spring, MD, and Arlington, VA, compete amongst one another within that region (Washington MSA). In the case of Boston and NYC, you'd almost certainly see most transport and commute patterns within either city, with the inter-city transport being considered non-commute, for the most part. More generally, this is why transportation networks almost always have to be designed, scoped, planned, and financed at least one level above the nodes they connect. Rome centrally managed highway construction throughout the Roman Empire, rather than leaving the decisions to local colonies and cities. In France and England, the first constructed transport systems, canals, were largely overseen as matters of national policy (though with private involvement), as was the Erie Canal in the United States. Development of railroads typically evolved similarly, with buildouts within specific nations in the US and Europe. This lead to a far more integrated system in the US (and USSR) given their much larger geographical area, whilst Europe's freight rail system remains much less capable than that of the United States.
- __derek__ 10y ago
  That's part of what I mean: we have these antiquated divisions (i.e. states) that have little connection with the actual economy. Why not create a system that does that?* * In the United States we know the answer, of course: rural areas have the power, and doing so would require them to cede that. One can dream, though.
bkeroack 10y ago
It's not "cannibalization", it's competition. We don't say that firm A "cannibalizes" the sales of firm B, they compete for customers just like states and regions compete for residents and their tax dollars.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  If you can appropriate benefits whilst imposing costs on others, it's absolutely cannibalisation. It's a parasitic process which benefits one part of the whole at an overall cost to the whole. It is not wealth creation, it is liquidity extraction. And this absolutely can apply to businesses operating in markets, as it can governments operating in regions.
  - niftich 10y ago
    Don't we call this 'rent-seeking'?
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Not necessarily, though I'd have to think about that. Economic rent is essentially payment for time-based access to some capability which isn't (generally) consumed in use. Agricultural rents are the nominal case, though others apply. One characteristic of rents, as opposed to raw material inputs, is that while high material costs lead to high general price levels, that is, a supply-shock inflation, high price levels lead to high rents. (If you're living in the San Francisco Bay Area, that check you're cutting every month is due, at least in significant part, to the high local labour pay rate. Though yes, a constrained housing supply has a great deal to do with this.) The landlord (or rentier) can successfully extract liquidity, but she isn't imposing costs elsewhere. There's a difference if you, say, have one part of a region which offers employment, and another which offers housing, but they're unconnected. The externalities of employment (congestion, traffic, pollution, crime, infrastructure provision) aren't borne by the housing provider. Though the employment region may also be spared other expenses, e.g., residential sewerage and education costs, though those are often much lower. Here you've got a situation where arbitrary division lines of cost burden vs. profits accrual. This is distinct from the typical case of rent-seeking, in which a landlord's privileged position allows them to extract the benefits of increased demand. Your question goes deep into the questions of cost, value, and price theory, and it's a very common element of much economic theory, which treats the behaviors of prices for wages, stocks, capital, rents, and goods fairly distinctly. Particularly in the 18th and 19th century discussion, but also in much 20th century literature.
bogomipz 10y ago
Rhode Island will have to get in line behind New Hampshire then. A significant portion of the population there work in Massachusetts but live in New Hampshire because it has the lowest tax burden out of any state in the union. Also there is no personal income tax or sales tax. Rhode Island has its work cut out for it. For those not familiar with that part of the US, Massachusetts can be heard referred to as Taxachusetts. I think R.I. is better trying to cultivate its own economy, Providence is home to two great schools - RISD and Brown(Ivy League.) This has some actual numbers: http://blog.mecep.org/2014/05/much-of-new-hampshire-is-a-bedroom-of-massachusetts/ http://blog.mecep.org/2014/05/much-of-new-hampshire-is-a-bed...
- __derek__ 10y ago
  That's true. A similar situation plays out in Portland (OR, with no sales tax) and Vancouver (WA, with no income tax). I recognize that moving to a regional government would likely eliminate the low-tax living/working options. At the same time, I wonder if the net-effect wouldn't be a smoothing of tax burdens, as this sort of tax-optimization effectively forces Massachusetts to tax more heavily to make up for a smaller base. After all, those New Hampshire commuters still use Massachusetts infrastructure to get to work.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    Those commuters pay a toll though each way of their commute to use that infrastructure. In the morning they would pay it in New Hampshire and in the evening they would pay it to Massachusetts. I think the net effect of a regional government would be all the current problems of local governments - pork barrel politics, inefficient bureaucracy and corruption on a larger scale. The corruption in local governments always seem to dwarf that at the federal Level, but this is maybe because more get caught. Overall the whole local tax benefit regime is something of a shell game. There may be no local income tax but you end up paying it property tax. States make up for it in other ways. A similar phenomenon exists for business tax incentives. As soon as those provisions sunset the businesses will just pick up and move somewhere else. An example is the film industry, New Orleans offered Hollywood huge tax incentives to use New Orleans for film production. Once those ended Hollywood went elsewhere - Georgia and the cycle begins again. It does little for the local economy.
colechristensen 10y ago
Who says that consolidation will lead to a better result or that it is zero-sum? There is a reason that the world isn't run by a single person, why separate countries succeed, why most countries share authority with smaller sub-governments (state and local in the US. There's a reason why each species isn't a single superorganism, but individuals within species tend to cooperate. "Life", evolution, or survival of the fittest -- clearly isn't a zero sum game. Over billions of years it's clear that it's positive sum. Blindingly obvious. Adjacent governments too may well fit the bill. Too much competition can suck all the excess value out of the situation, but so can too little. The ideal form of government might be an angelic dictator, but you don't see the world full of them, do you? Healthy competition can find the optimum much better than singular good intentions. Partially because it allows experiment with real world results. With n=1 you can enact policy but you can only guess what effects it might have had because you have no control, no basis for comparison. It's all about _healthy_ competition, and it's the basic idea that our republic was built on which can be seen everywhere in the constitution.
- __derek__ 10y ago
  It's a big leap to go from proposing more regionally-appropriate subdivisions of government to a single global government. I understand what you're trying to say, but there is no meaningful competition here. Boston is the region's center of gravity, and neither Providence nor Manchester threaten that. Meaningful competition comes in at the inter-regional level (e.g., Boston vs. New York).
  - Retric 10y ago
    Bostion is not a single entity, it's an interconnected network of many types of entity's and local governments etc. Each of those local governments both compete with and help each other.
    - __derek__ 10y ago
      Yes, the point was that the status quo is strange. See the GP.
StanislavPetrov 10y ago
>If there were one regional government, that could be avoided by focusing decisions about infrastructure, housing, services, and taxation on the actual region's health. The problem is that the bigger an organization gets the more it is prone to waste, inefficiency, and fraud. Another problem is that accountability is inversely proportional to concentration of power. This opinion is obviously at odds with that of the pointy heads in Washington DC and Brussels, but unlike their opinion, is congruent with reality.
- __derek__ 10y ago
  The states are quite wasteful, innefficient, and corrupt. Moving to a hub model would devolve power from them to smaller, more focused units.
kidsthesedays 10y ago
There's no parts of Connecticut that are part of "the Boston area" nor is the southern part of Rhode island.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- __derek__ 10y ago
  There certainly are, according to the definition of the Boston CSA.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston#Combined_statistical_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston#Combined_statis...
Spooky23 10y ago
NYC is an example of why that doesn't work. 120 years of city planning have mostly boiled down to: "Not Manhattan? Screw off" The Rhode Island situation is a good example of how postwar sprawl leads to bad governance and outcomes. The Boston region is a shitshow... Hundreds of little municipalities with duplicative services, priorities, regulations, etc. The other problem Rhode Island has is that they are on the wane in general. Regional industrial activity has been vaporized, and remaining industries like banking are consolidating. So if you live there, and need a job, Boston's it.

niftich 10y ago

You're not wrong, but this doesn't just happen in America, and it doesn't just happen at the city, county, or state level. There are entire countries or overseas departments of countries that cannibalize tax bases of others, some in corporate taxes, some in personal taxes. There are countries that, due to low wages, low cost of living, and low worker protections, can manufacture certain goods really cheap. There are countries that can ruin their countryside extracting resources like copper, rare earth metals, or oil and sell it internationally. Ultimately regardless of what the territorial unit, each unit looks out for their self-interest, because a 'Unified Greater Boston' may result in more growth, but it will likely come with a different allocation on wealth to the particular area that each fiefdom covers. It's really just capitalism where each entity competes with another, and some win really big, while most don't.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
__derek__ 10y ago
No, it's not a uniquely American phenomenon, but that's the example at hand and the one that I'm most familiar with.
Symbiote 10y ago
As an example of a better situation, London covers the cities and many smaller towns and suburbs, which each have their own local government. The local areas are responsible for schools, waste, most planning etc. But it's all unified under the Greater London Authority, which controls transport and policing. This is what the Mayor of London controls, as head of the elected London Assembly.
- chillydawg 10y ago
  Except the City Of London, which refuses to cede some 1000 year old power it extorted from some king or other.

em3rgent0rdr 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_divided_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_divided_cities

__derek__ 10y ago
As it happens, I grew up in one.

chrismcb 10y ago

This problem isn't unique to am America, and the problem will never really go away. Regions change and they grow. What happens when your Boston region starts to conflict with the NYC region?

dredmorbius 10y ago
There are models of urban influence based on analogues of gravitational attraction (they're actually called that, see: http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa031601a.htm http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa031601a.htm). For any two given urban areas, their relationship is likely to be eitheras peers, that is, one competes with another (for labour, capital, and foreign trade), or as distinct members of a regional hierarchy (e.g., commuter suburb and commercial hub). And yes, depending on how you scope out regions, they may have different comparable roles. Note too that two suburbs within a given hierarchical region, say, Silver Spring, MD, and Arlington, VA, compete amongst one another within that region (Washington MSA). In the case of Boston and NYC, you'd almost certainly see most transport and commute patterns within either city, with the inter-city transport being considered non-commute, for the most part. More generally, this is why transportation networks almost always have to be designed, scoped, planned, and financed at least one level above the nodes they connect. Rome centrally managed highway construction throughout the Roman Empire, rather than leaving the decisions to local colonies and cities. In France and England, the first constructed transport systems, canals, were largely overseen as matters of national policy (though with private involvement), as was the Erie Canal in the United States. Development of railroads typically evolved similarly, with buildouts within specific nations in the US and Europe. This lead to a far more integrated system in the US (and USSR) given their much larger geographical area, whilst Europe's freight rail system remains much less capable than that of the United States.
__derek__ 10y ago
That's part of what I mean: we have these antiquated divisions (i.e. states) that have little connection with the actual economy. Why not create a system that does that?* * In the United States we know the answer, of course: rural areas have the power, and doing so would require them to cede that. One can dream, though.

bkeroack 10y ago

It's not "cannibalization", it's competition. We don't say that firm A "cannibalizes" the sales of firm B, they compete for customers just like states and regions compete for residents and their tax dollars.

dredmorbius 10y ago
If you can appropriate benefits whilst imposing costs on others, it's absolutely cannibalisation. It's a parasitic process which benefits one part of the whole at an overall cost to the whole. It is not wealth creation, it is liquidity extraction. And this absolutely can apply to businesses operating in markets, as it can governments operating in regions.
- niftich 10y ago
  Don't we call this 'rent-seeking'?
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Not necessarily, though I'd have to think about that. Economic rent is essentially payment for time-based access to some capability which isn't (generally) consumed in use. Agricultural rents are the nominal case, though others apply. One characteristic of rents, as opposed to raw material inputs, is that while high material costs lead to high general price levels, that is, a supply-shock inflation, high price levels lead to high rents. (If you're living in the San Francisco Bay Area, that check you're cutting every month is due, at least in significant part, to the high local labour pay rate. Though yes, a constrained housing supply has a great deal to do with this.) The landlord (or rentier) can successfully extract liquidity, but she isn't imposing costs elsewhere. There's a difference if you, say, have one part of a region which offers employment, and another which offers housing, but they're unconnected. The externalities of employment (congestion, traffic, pollution, crime, infrastructure provision) aren't borne by the housing provider. Though the employment region may also be spared other expenses, e.g., residential sewerage and education costs, though those are often much lower. Here you've got a situation where arbitrary division lines of cost burden vs. profits accrual. This is distinct from the typical case of rent-seeking, in which a landlord's privileged position allows them to extract the benefits of increased demand. Your question goes deep into the questions of cost, value, and price theory, and it's a very common element of much economic theory, which treats the behaviors of prices for wages, stocks, capital, rents, and goods fairly distinctly. Particularly in the 18th and 19th century discussion, but also in much 20th century literature.

bogomipz 10y ago

Rhode Island will have to get in line behind New Hampshire then. A significant portion of the population there work in Massachusetts but live in New Hampshire because it has the lowest tax burden out of any state in the union. Also there is no personal income tax or sales tax. Rhode Island has its work cut out for it. For those not familiar with that part of the US, Massachusetts can be heard referred to as Taxachusetts. I think R.I. is better trying to cultivate its own economy, Providence is home to two great schools - RISD and Brown(Ivy League.) This has some actual numbers: http://blog.mecep.org/2014/05/much-of-new-hampshire-is-a-bedroom-of-massachusetts/ http://blog.mecep.org/2014/05/much-of-new-hampshire-is-a-bed...

__derek__ 10y ago
That's true. A similar situation plays out in Portland (OR, with no sales tax) and Vancouver (WA, with no income tax). I recognize that moving to a regional government would likely eliminate the low-tax living/working options. At the same time, I wonder if the net-effect wouldn't be a smoothing of tax burdens, as this sort of tax-optimization effectively forces Massachusetts to tax more heavily to make up for a smaller base. After all, those New Hampshire commuters still use Massachusetts infrastructure to get to work.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  Those commuters pay a toll though each way of their commute to use that infrastructure. In the morning they would pay it in New Hampshire and in the evening they would pay it to Massachusetts. I think the net effect of a regional government would be all the current problems of local governments - pork barrel politics, inefficient bureaucracy and corruption on a larger scale. The corruption in local governments always seem to dwarf that at the federal Level, but this is maybe because more get caught. Overall the whole local tax benefit regime is something of a shell game. There may be no local income tax but you end up paying it property tax. States make up for it in other ways. A similar phenomenon exists for business tax incentives. As soon as those provisions sunset the businesses will just pick up and move somewhere else. An example is the film industry, New Orleans offered Hollywood huge tax incentives to use New Orleans for film production. Once those ended Hollywood went elsewhere - Georgia and the cycle begins again. It does little for the local economy.

colechristensen 10y ago

Who says that consolidation will lead to a better result or that it is zero-sum? There is a reason that the world isn't run by a single person, why separate countries succeed, why most countries share authority with smaller sub-governments (state and local in the US. There's a reason why each species isn't a single superorganism, but individuals within species tend to cooperate. "Life", evolution, or survival of the fittest -- clearly isn't a zero sum game. Over billions of years it's clear that it's positive sum. Blindingly obvious. Adjacent governments too may well fit the bill. Too much competition can suck all the excess value out of the situation, but so can too little. The ideal form of government might be an angelic dictator, but you don't see the world full of them, do you? Healthy competition can find the optimum much better than singular good intentions. Partially because it allows experiment with real world results. With n=1 you can enact policy but you can only guess what effects it might have had because you have no control, no basis for comparison. It's all about _healthy_ competition, and it's the basic idea that our republic was built on which can be seen everywhere in the constitution.

__derek__ 10y ago
It's a big leap to go from proposing more regionally-appropriate subdivisions of government to a single global government. I understand what you're trying to say, but there is no meaningful competition here. Boston is the region's center of gravity, and neither Providence nor Manchester threaten that. Meaningful competition comes in at the inter-regional level (e.g., Boston vs. New York).
- Retric 10y ago
  Bostion is not a single entity, it's an interconnected network of many types of entity's and local governments etc. Each of those local governments both compete with and help each other.
  - __derek__ 10y ago
    Yes, the point was that the status quo is strange. See the GP.

StanislavPetrov 10y ago

>If there were one regional government, that could be avoided by focusing decisions about infrastructure, housing, services, and taxation on the actual region's health. The problem is that the bigger an organization gets the more it is prone to waste, inefficiency, and fraud. Another problem is that accountability is inversely proportional to concentration of power. This opinion is obviously at odds with that of the pointy heads in Washington DC and Brussels, but unlike their opinion, is congruent with reality.

__derek__ 10y ago
The states are quite wasteful, innefficient, and corrupt. Moving to a hub model would devolve power from them to smaller, more focused units.

kidsthesedays 10y ago

There's no parts of Connecticut that are part of "the Boston area" nor is the southern part of Rhode island.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
__derek__ 10y ago
There certainly are, according to the definition of the Boston CSA.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston#Combined_statistical_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston#Combined_statis...

Spooky23 10y ago

NYC is an example of why that doesn't work. 120 years of city planning have mostly boiled down to: "Not Manhattan? Screw off" The Rhode Island situation is a good example of how postwar sprawl leads to bad governance and outcomes. The Boston region is a shitshow... Hundreds of little municipalities with duplicative services, priorities, regulations, etc. The other problem Rhode Island has is that they are on the wane in general. Regional industrial activity has been vaporized, and remaining industries like banking are consolidating. So if you live there, and need a job, Boston's it.