[bavent]

Having the house capped is also ridiculous. My rep is also the rep for 750k+ other people. One person cannot represent a district that size appropriately at a federal level. They also cannot really respond to constituents properly either when they have that many.

[CalChris]

For 2020 it was 761,169 and Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska have less population than that. They still get a Member and then they get two Senators. And they get three electoral votes.

Yeah, it's pretty messed up.

[interestica]

Having representation based on land/physical space will increasingly be seen as absurd.

Maybe we will have “youth reps” in the future. Or reps based on other organizing group (hunters? Musicians?). The problem is…taxonomical? People won’t have to belong to a single group but can belong to several “unions”.

[dehrmann]

But 5,000 representatives can't run a country, either.

[dangus]

China has almost 3,000 house members. The UK has almost 1,500 parliament members with a far smaller population.

The US also has state representatives in every state.

This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.

Even a modest increase in representative count would go a long way to make America more democratic and lessen the impacts of gerrymandering.

[dehrmann]

> This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.

Design by committee is a well-known failure mode. I'd argue that once the size of the house (or maybe one party's seats) gets past Dunbar's number, the house becomes less effective.

[dangus]

I’d argue the opposite. Congress could use more members so that it can have more sub-committees to craft legislation with more detail and taking on a larger number of issues with more precision.

There could be sub-committees dedicated to a larger quantity of issues and addressing more industries.

Your argument would be like if you were expecting Apple to only hire 100 engineers to write software for the huge product line they maintain. Maybe 100 engineers is a good number to make one product, but Apple has a huge product line.

Sometimes you legitimately need more people in an organization.

And this reminds me of how flawed your argument is when we already have highly functional corporations that have hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of managers and we know they function. Dividing and sub-dividing work is how it all gets managed.

[harshreality]

Very few legislators have expertise in anything except demagoguery, pandering, and graft. Having more of them to form more subcommittees to mess up more areas of the law... no thanks.

We need merit-selected technical committees of non-representatives to advise politicians and tell them clearly, in as much detail as necessary, when they're wrong on something. If the politicians don't listen, the technical committees should be independent and able to make their case on the internet and social media.

Implementing that would be difficult. The metric for merit is a challenge, and is itself easily coopted by politics. For example, China's vaunted "political meritocracy" is ultimately controlled by party leaders in the CCP, so it's basically a meritocracy for the CCP-aligned, not a meritocracy for anyone else. If a government's goals contradict facts-on-the-ground, the government will find a way to skew an "independent" technical committee to suppress those facts.

[Glyptodon]

The main reason I think this is wrong is that the sheer amount of different things the government needs to pay attention to in the modern world is staggering. In my view, it is well beyond what a few hundred reps can pay attention to. I think if you scale it, what you end up with is that representatives can be more specialized in ways that align with their constituency instead of being bad generalists.

[theoldgreybeard]

The federal government isn't supposed to "run the country".

[bavent]

I never said we needed 5k, if you have to pretend I said something in order to make an argument, you don’t really have an argument. You also provided no evidence that 5k reps can’t run a country either.

The U.K. has more than triple what we have. If we had 1500 representatives, that’s roughly 1 per 225k people. Not a great number, but much more reasonable at least, and also much closer to what representation was when the House was capped.

Smaller districts mean not just more accountability, but more similarity within the district. Right now, my district is 95% rural and 5% a slice of a city. I live in the city part, therefore my rep doesn’t care about what I have to say, as my wants and needs are different than the rural population that makes up the majority of who vote for him. Smaller districts are harder to gerrymander like this, and they also mean your rep probably lives a life relatively similar to yours - drives the same highways, experiences roughly the same tax burden, shops at the same places, participates in the same events. This will not be true for every case, but it’s still a better situation than what we have now.