California Cleavin'

There's campaign to split California into six smaller states. I'm sure I'm like a lot of people in that I only heard about it last week when it received The Colbert Bump. There have been a number of proposals over the years to split up states. It might be a big and diverse state like California, Texas, or New York. Or it might be a geographically separate part of a state, like Long Island or Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

As a geography nerd, this sort of thing really interests me. It's obvious that the subdivisions of countries often make no sense. Does it really make sense for Vermont and New Hampshire to be separate? And a number of people have tried to sort things out.  Here's a particularly detailed proposal for the U.S.

Here in Canada, I'd say our provinces make even less sense. Ontario and Quebec are not only much bigger than the others, they also have very different northern and southern parts. Manitoba and Saskatchewan don't game many differences, despite what they may say about each other. And P.E.I.? Really?

Buy much as of love to redraw the borders of North America, I have to point out that we should first decide what we want to accomplish with this layer of government. Should a state/province be a single, largely autonomous entity? That is, they are part of a unified country, but you could say that help from the central government should be avoided as much as possible. Or should it be a representative of a group of people with a lot in common?

The two approaches are kind of mutually exclusive. If you orient states around people with commonality, it will be economically weak. For instance: if a state is all rural farmland, it will be able to create policies that are great for farmers, and the state's presidential vote will be an undiluted voice of rural America. But, whenever times are tough for farmers, the state will be serious financial trouble.

Something that will really impact the direction to go, is how strong an ability the country has to transfer money around to mitigate localized economic problems. Right now, there's not a lot of appetite for equalization measures, so you'd be better off with states that have diversified economies.

So California - as it is now - is relatively well laid out due to its diversity. It's current financial problems ate mostly the fault of its overly-indulgent referendum system. Bit under the split plan, it would be split into a bunch of homogenous states. Some - particularly Silicon Valley - would be healthy, others not so much.  Overall, the state is better off together.  Though the San Andreas Fault may have other ideas.