if economic integration prevails, the optimal country size is small, maybe even a city-state.
Given what we know about optimal country size, a monolithic America makes less sense today than it did a century ago. What made America into the superpower that it is today is its massive internal free trade area. Now that trade barriers have declined worldwide, this is less of an advantage than ever before. It’s not at all clear that this diminishing advantage outweighs the cost of our divisive politics based on unshared cultural assumptions.
I have been interested in this issue for a long time. In 2005, I wrote We need 250 states. Among other things, I pointed out that
In 1790, the largest state in the union, Virginia, had a population of under 700,000. Today, Montgomery County has a population of over 900,000. Our nine-member County Council answers to about the same number of registered voters as the entire House of Representatives of the United States at the time of the founding of the Republic.
Switzerland, although it is much smaller than the U.S., is even more decentralized. We have way too much policy made in Washington relative to what could be made more appropriately at local levels. But right now Washington is the only city that can borrow huge sums of money, and that makes it hard to shift responsibilities around.
One of my co-workers has a dream — that he admits is unrealistic — of making Congress much larger, so that the Representative/represented ratio is much closer to what it was in the early years of the country. That is a more moderate step in the direction you suggest.
My concern with the full small-state approach would be how small polities deal with major threats from outside, either aggressive states, opportunistic raiders, or natural disasters. ISIS is one example; asymmetric warfare and sporadic terroristic attacks are another. It seems like a lot of national security efforts — intelligence production, military R&D, and perhaps military action — would need to be outsourced to forms that serve several or many of these mini-nations.
I see a lot of plausible benefits for small states in terms of liberty, voting by exit, and government accountability. I fear that small states is not a stable or sustainable condition.
This is not a workable or meaningful reform given the way congress works now. You would need to wind the clock back 85 years, and make a lot of other changes too to achieve the intended effect.
You are right that big states advantage is in providing collective security. But think marginally: security challenges still exist, but they are less important than when the modern state system formed. small states in western Europe or the US don’t need to worry about Louis XIV gobbling them up.
Devolve more power to states and especially municipalities and bring back revenue sharing?
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/10/opinion/federal-revenue-sharing-born-1972-died-1986-rip.html
Rather inconsistent with your belief money doesn’t matter.
Large internal markets matter less, especially when you already have them and discount everything else done in common, though the division in this case would likely not be the city state but the urban productive areas and the rural less productive areas as these have more in common within than between. Trade is important, but hardly the only thing important.
Turns out it takes a bit more than a century:
“But if we Americans were to set about giving to the state governments things to do that had better be done by counties and towns, and giving the federal government things to do that had better be done by the states, it would not take many generations to dull the keen edge of our political capacity. We should lose it as inevitably as the most consummate of pianists will lose his facility if he stops practicing. It is therefore a fact of cardinal importance that in the United States the local governments of township, county, and city are left to administer themselves instead of being administered by a great bureau with its head at the state capital. ”
–Civil Government in the United States (1902), John Fiske
Fiske also discusses how we, America, do/did a fair job at the federal, state and even county level, but never got cities to work under democracy. He theorizes it is due to the intimate and extensive services cities provide. But, having failed to figure out how to work city government correctly, we decided to make the President a super-mayor with a federal government providing extensive daily services.
Of course, the early 20th century Progressive solution for city government was to cut out the elected mayors and city councils and install professional (generally unaccountable) city managers to whom the police chiefs, etc., to whom the are accountable.
Maybe the original constitution was not so bad after all. Time to think about dusting off the Articles. The great thing about Trump is that with his real world experience he understands delegation. Let’s hope he is able to make structural changes
To promote more accountability that will endure beyond his administration. It will beworth watching to see if he moves in a direction consistent with your observations.