| HN Mirror

The point is, when you compartmentalize 10m people in 10x 1m provinces with local governments, it's relatively easy to have these 10 provinces be directed by a singular governmental policy. But when you try the same for a 100m population, or a 1000m population, you'd get 10 compartments of 100m, 100 compartments of 10m below this, and 1000 compartments of 1m. To expect each to follow the national policy is very difficult to do. You either need a strong dictatorship, or you need to accept that different compartments may elect radically different policies, which is why I don't think you can just implement and scale a policy to 1300m as easy as one can to 17m.

That's why you see huge differences for example between states even in things we expect to all agree on. There's very few national policies that simply scale to all states exactly the same, the military probably being a big one. But things like education, police or fire departments, housing, healthcare or even marriage, can be radically different. But here in the Netherlands? On tons of topics like education, police, healthcare or marriage, it's exactly the same in every single province, because we're pretty much one big state, despite quite large differences between provinces. e.g. 2 hours north-east, I can't understand the local language, here it's mostly protestant but two hours south is mostly catholic. But despite big differences in culture, language, religion, but also industries and demographics, it's extremely homogeneous in policies. To me that says that you can't just scale a policy to 300m like you can to 17m.