Ask HN: Would Americans be happier if the US was several independent countries? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would Americans be happier if the US was several independent countries?

16 pointsalando466 comments

Interested in hearing perspectives from the HN community.

Note that you would achieve the same thing by pushing more power back to the states. This is the way the country was designed -- citizens retain most all of the power. They give some of that power to their state. Their state then gives some of that power to the nation. The nation ensures free trade among the states, defends against any foreign enemies, and provides basic nation-keeping duties: border, customs, etc. (One might even imagine addressing pollution and other externalities issues as being in the basic nation-building category)

My answer is yes. The more we centralize powers that used to be local, the more we end up in this winner-take-all thing we have going on, where rules are made in a one-sized-fits all manner. That's bad for a multitude of reasons. As much as possible, distributed, self-optimizing systems out perform command-and-control systems. (But not always. When that paradigm doesn't work, the fallback should always be a federated, staggered and layered system)

Is there any historical evidence suggesting that democracy can make enough people happy enough (to justify the pains of political negotiations) at the size/scale of the U.S?

No there isn't.

Note that true democracy begins failing as soon as you begin leaving a small social group. By the time you get to the Dunbar Number, it's already failed and you have to move to some kind of representative system.

Even representative systems fail, however, and for the same reason: human social interactions don't scale. So you might get to a Dunbar Number squared level, and decrease the feedback time, and make it work up to half a million or so.

That's city or borough sized. From that point outwards it's just partisan power plays -- then you're really looking at how organized groups act -- which is a good reason to limit power more and more the larger the scale.

The general form of this question (are people happier if they're in smaller communities) inspired this other post of mine [0]. As far as the answer: the short answer is yes. The long answer is, "it depends" [1]. Personally, I believe the ideal community size is 100 - 1000 people. One where you know at least intimately 10% [2] of the population and have hard of 100%. I also think a small community is ideal for proper implementation of democracy. Mainly because it's easier to ensure education parity in a small population, meaning the democratic process is fairer.

My tangent aside, to answer your question, I think it would be no. Any happiness increase of the people living in the new United State(s) will surely be negated by the huge pain and suffering required to create them. If you discount that, the answer to that is also probably yes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13468508

[1] http://www.citylab.com/design/2011/10/urban-rural-happiness-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

If you divide the US into smaller pieces, there would still be a need to merge the resources to maintain the military supremacy (to compete with China/Russia) and then you very well might have your military-industrial-complex running the place.

If they could live side by side in peace perhaps, but I doubt they could.

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