[maker1138]

Hong Kong has become a Special Administrative Region of China and has it's own justice, education, and political system (mostly). I think it would be a great idea to have several of these regions across the us to "beta test" different policies to see whether they would be good or bad. Changing a policy or law of an entire nation is hard and risky; trying these things out in special regions, where you have a known trial period, would allow much faster innovation in the political space.

[jfaucett]

I don't see why we aren't doing something like this. Especially when you start looking at how much it might cost.

Birmingham, AL has a population of 212k and a yearly budget of 390 million. (https://ballotpedia.org/Analysis_of_spending_in_America's_la...) When you consider the USA govt spent about 70 Billion on R&D in 2016 (http://www.aaas.org/page/historical-trends-federal-rd). That would be about 0.5% of total R&D spending.