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Comment by grondilu | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of something I have been wondering lately : what is the ideal size for a country? I mean, most borders nowadays are remnants of a very different world where kings were continuously fighting to maximize their territory, or at least not to let it shrink. Things are very different these days, since most countries are peaceful and democratic.

If we were to rationalize all this and draw lines peacefully, what would be the typical size of a country? Would we chose no country at all, in a world-government? Would we pick the "city-state" model, as often advocated by libertarians?

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The smaller the better.

Given the US perspective of polarized politics, how does it make sense that the strongly-held beliefs of one portion of the voting citizens should be foisted upon the remainder of the entire population?

Smaller government is more responsive to the local conditions and culture than is large government. And the inevitable abuses of the state against the citizenry will be limited in scope.

The question wasn't about the size of the government, it was about the physical size of the country. Tiny countries would lack many natural resources, would probably lack any sizable military, and would be powerfully affected by the economies of the countries around it.

It would be interesting to see if there is correlation between size of the government and size of the country.

Of course, along with very small government, I would also advocate 100% free trade and very low regulatory burden, such that a small land-area country could still be an economic powerhouse.

On the contrary, smaller countries are less effective in the international arena (militarily, economically, and politically). Banding together with other countries only creates a meta-republic of countries (e.g. the EU).

So I think the original question is quite valid. There's a sweet spot somewhere between "as big as possible" (e.g. US or Russia) and "as small as possible" (e.g. city-states).

My gut would be that it's more determined by economic production and ethnic subgroups than some constant. Sufficient economic production to play competitively on the world stage, while grouping as many like or agreeing ethnic groups as possible (and preventing their repressing minority groups).

Or in other words, international jerrymandering.

I personally favor a weak federal government, somewhere in the vicinity of the Articles of Confederation or EU, which manages military and basic rights, supervening mainly on city-states and with special provision for a different local model for large rural areas.

Well first let's tackle a simpler similar question that might inform our view - What's the ideal programming language?

lol, good point.

I think more than size, it is about the cultural/religious/historic identity of across a geographic area. If you look into the history of how many country borders were created (India-Pak, The creation of Iraq, the creation of Syria) etc. a lot of the historic distress caused between the people is because of differences in identity. If there is a strong shared identity between people across a large area, then it is relatively easier to understand concepts like "for the greater good" and empathizing with people as your own.

Sadly, countries rarely are created as such, and are demarcated more along lines of conquest (which is a very weak signal of local culture, especially if the local civilisation has been around for 1000s of years but conguests happened 400 years ago) or even sometimes on what can only be described as kookoo political ideologies.

As you say, the threat of invasion was the only reason people banded together physically. Now the the threat is gone, we should see more (as small as possible) city-states because everyone loves freedom and more control over their lives. There would not be a world government. Instead multilateralism is how the world would coordinate/cooperate.

City-states are the closest to being self-contained economic units, and having the scope of government match the scope of people's economic lives is a good thing.[Citation Needed]

The benefits of large governments - uniform currency, uniform code of law - have been increasingly eroding and losing relevance, so I am pretty sold on the city-state model.

The bigger the better. Like it or not, we are operating in a global economy and bigger gets massive economies of scale in production and consumption, and leverage in trade with the other blocs. (This is the reason Europe and the US are being destabilised by outside forces.)

Catalonia has a population of 7.5 million. In the EU, there are 13 countries that are smaller than Catalonia.

Some of them, like Denmark or Finland are doing pretty well, and have some of the most advanced democracies in the world.

10 km^2

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