That's one anecdotal datum in support of the hypothesis: NH is #12 on the "not enough money to be corrupt" candidate list. The NH economy is 3% the size of Cal

That's one anecdotal datum in support of the hypothesis: NH is #12 on the "not enough money to be corrupt" candidate list. The NH economy is 3% the size of California's, with 5.7% the land area, and 3.4% the population. That suggests it has less than 3% the corruption opportunity, because the state still has to accomplish a lot of the same functions with about 3% as much money. Some things scale by land area or population, and other things are simply flat administrative burden, such as keeping the lights on in the sole state legislature building. Any person wanting to profit from their own corruptibility would therefore not stay in NH, and would not go to Maine or Vermont, who have even less money to be stolen, but would instead go to Massachusetts, which is #11 on the "enough money to steal" candidate list. And take a ladle, to skim off some of the extra money sloshing around Boston. This suggests that many of our largest (by money) states could be broken up as an anti-corruption measure, to divide the flows from tax revenues into expenditures into more channels, with less flowing through each. A corrupt person can only fish for dishonest opportunities in one metaphorical river at any one time. How corrupt would Illinois be, if Chicago-Naperville-Elgin-Gary were no longer attached to it? How would California differ if Los-Angeles-Long-Beach and San-Francisco-Oakland-San-Jose were no longer part of it? Would the effect be more pronounced in states where the current capital is not also the largest city: New York, California, Illinois, Texas, Florida?