A New Map for America

The fantasies of central planners never end.<p>The author neglects entirely the fact that these city-states arose <i>without</i> 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, &quot;We should target the Northeast Corridor to produce 20% of our GDP&quot;? No. That result was organic.<p>Here&#x27;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.<p>The primary fallacies in this central planner&#x27;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.

&quot;What is needed, in some ways, is a return to this more flexible, broader way of thinking.&quot; Well, if the courts and the White House (as inhabited by Democrats AND Republicans) wouldn&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Laboratories_of_democracy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Laboratories_of_democracy</a><p>(edited to correct a typo)

Here is a map of the US according the distance to major cities. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymail.co.uk&#x2F;sciencetech&#x2F;article-2626281&#x2F;The-maps-MATHS-Borders-redrawn-using-algorithms-relating-distance-cities-not-politics.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymail.co.uk&#x2F;sciencetech&#x2F;article-2626281&#x2F;The-m...</a><p>Electoral college reform (fifty states with equal population) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fakeisthenewreal.org&#x2F;reform&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fakeisthenewreal.org&#x2F;reform&#x2F;</a><p>This type of gerrymandering or repartition is a rich part of US voting history. The legal term might be &quot;apportionment&quot; or the math term could be &quot;equipartition&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_congressional_apportionment#Constitutional_texts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_congressional_ap...</a><p><pre><code> 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, &amp; 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;… </code></pre> These touch questions about geographical fairness have always existed. In the 21st century, these might be solved with computational geometry.

Tangentially to the article&#x27;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: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;emerald.tufts.edu&#x2F;alumni&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;fall2013&#x2F;images&#x2F;features&#x2F;upinarms-map-large.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;emerald.tufts.edu&#x2F;alumni&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;fall2013&#x2F;images&#x2F;fea...</a><p>It&#x27;s a great read.

<i>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.<p>This reshuffling has profound economic consequences. America is increasingly divided not between red states and blue states, but between connected hubs and disconnected backwaters.</i><p>If you&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Power to the people.<p>[1]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realclearpolitics.com&#x2F;epolls&#x2F;2016&#x2F;president&#x2F;republican_vote_count.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realclearpolitics.com&#x2F;epolls&#x2F;2016&#x2F;president&#x2F;repub...</a>

Everyone would vote for a redrawing. No one would agree to any of the redrawings.

In context Montana etc rebounded less because it fell less, and it fell less because it missed the boom.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>Even things as basic as crime stats get mixed into this. People simply get away with less crap in city&#x27;s.<p>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.

Reminds me of Joel Garreau&#x27;s Nine Nations of North America (1981) about which he commented 3 decades later:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;roomfordebate&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;where-do-borders-need-to-be-redrawn&#x2F;nine-nations-of-north-america-30-years-later" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;roomfordebate&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;where-do-bor...</a><p>It also ignores state boundaries, but includes Canada and parts of Mexico and the Caribbean.

One of my favorite drawing-up of America is based on data from Where&#x27;s George:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;krulwich&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;16&#x2F;177512687&#x2F;a-whom-do-you-hang-with-map-of-america" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;krulwich&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;16&#x2F;177512687&#x2F;a-...</a>

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&#x27;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.

Thank god we have this article from the New York Times to tell the rest of the country how we should be organizing ourselves.

I mean, this map (as any) has a lot of problems. The most obvious ones in my view are &quot;How is Wyoming part of the Great Plains and not the Inland West&quot; and &quot;How is all of Indiana urban in the same way that Chicago is&quot;?<p>But the bigger problem is twofold. First, you don&#x27;t have to &lt;redraw state lines&gt; 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 &quot;urban planning&quot; as inherently racist, there&#x27;s no real possibility of a consensus to have any plan at all to improve American cities as a whole.

I find it funny that most of these proposals completely ignore US territories. Those people are truly second hand US citizens.

Northern California would be a lot nicer if it were a separate state, formed at the border of Monterey and SLO counties.

The author&#x27;s obvious disdain for rural Americans makes it hard to see through to his main point, that urban centers&#x27; power should not be inhibited by state governments.<p>I don&#x27;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.<p>The notion that urban centers are superior to rural areas is ridiculous given cities&#x27; dependence on rural agriculture, natural resource extraction, etc.<p>Could it be that urbanists simply don&#x27;t want to be forced to confront in state legislatures the potential negative impacts their sprawling cities impose upon rural neighbors? That&#x27;s the impression this article gives me.

America should just be honest, city and non-city areas should be divide and run independently as two populations.<p>Map showing what America really looks like: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;4&#x2F;47&#x2F;Cartlinearlarge.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;4&#x2F;47&#x2F;Cartline...</a>

Check out the speedy railway system that is in China now:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;crh.gaotie.cn&#x2F;CRHMAP.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;crh.gaotie.cn&#x2F;CRHMAP.html</a><p>The whole country is meshed with new railway systems that normally runs at 200 miles&#x2F;hour(designed for 218 Miles&#x2F;hour), it presents large pressure to local airlines and is really convenient when I travel there.

I&#x27;ve long advocated redrawing state borders, similar to how they&#x27;re shown in <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tjc.com&#x2F;38states&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tjc.com&#x2F;38states&#x2F;</a><p>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.<p>There&#x27;s many, many places in this nation where different parts of a state have entirely different cultures, and really shouldn&#x27;t be in the same state together. &quot;Upstate&quot; 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&#x27;t have their local politics dominated by people hundreds of miles away who don&#x27;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).<p>themagician is correct though: there&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t want to be part of that state any more, they shouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t be that hard to do, such as separating NYC from upstate NY.

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.

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&#x2F;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&#x27;t really take a train today, and this map doesn&#x27;t really help.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;s recognize this and not place new infrastructure to do it wrong from the start ;-)

I think all these proposals (and there have been a lot of these) relate back to a central problem in human relationships: Dunbar&#x27;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.<p>Not necessarily because of ill intent, but because you become just another number to whoever &quot;represents&quot; you.<p>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.<p>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 &#x2F; 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.<p>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.<p>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.

I know nothing about maps &#x2F; cartography but why wouldn&#x27;t they include a section called &quot;the mid west?&quot; It just seems that that is a term that so many people use, at least where I am from.

It&#x27;s gonna be basically impossible to build a metro-corridor from Albuquerque to Denver. Well I mean, basically impossible unless you&#x27;re cool with removing several entire mountain ranges.

It seems to me that the premise of this article is &quot;things have changed economically over the past 50 years, so we should change infrastructure to match&quot;. But then what happens in another 50 years when things change again? Wouldn&#x27;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 &quot;the 7 mega-regions are not serving us well&quot;?<p>Regardless, it sure would be great if we had a better rail system in the US!

&quot;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.&quot; 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.

I think I can summarize the OP thusly: &quot;All economic and political powers should be in the service of the interests of big urban centers&quot;.<p>No thanks.

This is a rehash of the (excellent!) Urban Archipelago manifesto from the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger in 2004:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thestranger.com&#x2F;seattle&#x2F;the-urban-archipelago&#x2F;Content?oid=19813" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thestranger.com&#x2F;seattle&#x2F;the-urban-archipelago&#x2F;Con...</a>

This maps illustrates free voluntary association, which is an alternative method of human organisation from central planning. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Panarchism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Panarchism</a>

Old but maybe still relevant: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;news_and_politics&#x2F;the_end_of_america.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;news_and_politics&#x2F;the_end_of_a...</a>

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 &quot;a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm&quot;)

The ideas in the article won&#x27;t be politically successful in today&#x27;s America, because congress and state governments are dominated by conservatives, and conservatives don&#x27;t believe in infrastructure spending.

To be fair, author should stick &quot;Great&quot; in front of each region.

About the author: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Parag_Khanna" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Parag_Khanna</a>

It&#x27;s a little weird that the borders of Arkansas are the only ones preserved in this map. There&#x27;s no great cultural or economic divide there.

Couldn&#x27;t help but...<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9gag.com&#x2F;gag&#x2F;a2mjvWe" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9gag.com&#x2F;gag&#x2F;a2mjvWe</a>

Part of Minnesota really belongs to The Great Lakes--the eastern half isn&#x27;t very &quot;Midwest&#x2F;Great Plains&quot;.

This map assumes, such as in the case of the southeast, that urban centers never change.

United we stand, divided we fall.

For some reason I thought it was a map for the whole continent :-)

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.

This looks like a map of Hyperloop stations.

Capitalism != Globalization

I love newly thinked maps - but I don&#x27;t like borders.

I clicked expecting the map of America, not USA.

US of A, we all would be better off if this concept would die.<p>Split up into smaller, independent nations, don&#x27;t terrorize the world with your armsdealing presidents wanting to achieve &quot;democrazy&quot;.<p>Don&#x27;t spy on its citizens as well as the rest of mankind.<p>Don&#x27;t poison our food via tradedeals negociated in secret with global consorts.<p>Don&#x27;t murder our leaders, only wanting to be free from you.<p>Please die.

This idea isn&#x27;t a new one. I vaguely remember reading such a suggestion in The People&#x27;s Almanac (I think vol 2), published in 1978. I have it somewhere in my library but I&#x27;m on a trip right now so it isn&#x27;t at hand; I wonder if any other HN reader&#x27;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?<p>Further, I can&#x27;t imagine a state like Texas signing up for being split in two. (&quot;Don&#x27;t Mess With Texas&quot; has been it&#x27;s anti-litter campaign for 30 years.)