Reading The Lettuce Leaves

Today, I bought lettuce. The selection was pretty poor, with only a few, wilted heads available. I'm assuming that's a product of the ongoing drought in California. I’m not sure how many people are aware of how much we rely on California for food. We think of it as being all about the entertainment and technology industries, and other than that, it’s all surfing, earthquakes, and mountains. But they also produce half of America’s fruits and vegetables. That makes me wonder: what is the rest of the U.S. doing? If California provides food and ideas, and China makes stuff, what are the other 49 states spending their time on?

But back to dry, dry California. It’s slowly dawning on people that there isn’t going to be an easy solution anytime soon, so they’re going to have to think about where they can cut water use. And a lot of people are looking at agriculture. It uses most of California’s water.

The Economist, for instance, demonizes farmers for taking so much water for something that makes up such a small part of the state’s economy. That sounds good, as long as you don’t remember that it’s providing half the country’s fruits and vegetables, so perhaps that is worth forcing someone in Anaheim to water the lawn every-other week.

We allocate resources in our society with a mixture of capitalism and government policy, and the result often doesn’t make that much sense. In this case, it seems to be the worst of both worlds: water use doesn’t make sense according to cold economic equations, and it’s not exactly environmentally conscious either. This is one of those cases where it becomes hard to tell the political sides apart. Conservatives would point out that deregulating water prices would lead to more efficient use, because water would be too expensive for water-intensive uses. And that would probably lead to reduced water use, and benefit the environment, which liberals would like. But it would also price the poor out the market, which they wouldn’t like. And once that Anaheim suburbanite can’t water the lawn, conservatives will sour on the idea too. So this is one of those frustrating issues where we can’t use a knee-jerk solution, and will actually have to think about it.

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.