> With more than 16x the population of Australia In 2021, Australia's population was 25.69 million, and the US population was 331.9 million – so US population

> With more than 16x the population of Australia In 2021, Australia's population was 25.69 million, and the US population was 331.9 million – so US population was 12.9 times Australia's. Australia's population grows faster than the US, mainly due to significantly higher immigration (on a per capita basis), which causes the ratio to shrink over time - the figure you are citing was accurate 50+ years ago. By 2050, the ratio will probably have fallen to 11 or so; by the end of this century, it could easily be under 10. > With more than 16x the population of Australia and a heirarchy of representation limited by some naturally occuring factor at each level it's expected that the US would have more layers of organisation between a citizen and the highest decision making level. Well, the US does have 50 states versus only 6 for Australia – so that is the obvious level at which the US deals with being a much more populous country. US states are on average about 50% more populous than Australia's – 13 times the population but only 8 times as many states – but, the average US state has less people than NSW, Victoria's population is close to the US state average. Given they deal with being more populous by having more states, it isn't clear why they'd have to do that again at the sub-state level, especially given that 74% of US states have fewer people than NSW. And, maybe things in the US would work better if they added another 10 or so states by breaking up some of the larger ones, in which case the average state population gap between Australia and the US would shrink significantly. > Similarly I referred to the US as ossified and deified not so much in the sense of actual real constitutional changes (it was interesting what you wrote and that you were across the details) but more in the sense of what the common US citizen on forums appears to believe about their own country. I think you are on to something in that Americans are politically conservative – even Americans who identify as "liberal" or "progressive" are fundamentally conservative, if we put aside economics and hot-button social issues, and just focus on the core meaning of conservatism as "resistance to change". America's politics – even at the state level – are so ossified because US culture is (in that sense) much more conservative than that of the UK or Australia, among other countries. The extreme slowness in the adoption of the metric system is arguably another example of that.