Comment on Open thread, 9-15 June 2014

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 19:34:21 GMT

[The] original post was clear (and "compare Dubai with other cities" would have been misleading)

Here is more of the context:

I was thinking of Yemen, Oman and Somalia...I've heard good things about Dubai, but not enough to do a serious comparison between it and other countries

In the above, "the UAE" should replace "Dubai". If the UAE is so heterogeneous a country that greater specificity is required, then it should read "the UAE (particularly Dubai)", just as someone might write "the USA (particularly New York)".

The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is "wrong", for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver's-seat-of-car} is; they should be respectively "corrected" to {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, UAE} and {plane, train, boat, car}.

I think we could form a reasonably uncontroversial ranking of countries by "how distinct their political subdivisions are", and the US would be close to one end of the scale (though not quite as far along as UAE). Do you disagree?

Mildly, but that disagreement is tangential. Even if the UAE has the most distinct political subdivisions of any country in the world, it is still a country, and its political subdivisions are still political subdivisions.

The distinction between a country and a non-country is pretty sharp as far as human societal constructs go. We have established institutions for adjudicating this question (such as the UN, international treaties, diplomatic relations, etc.), and the results they present on the specific case of Dubai vs. the UAE are pretty unambiguous.

A typical country has some minor variations within the country (though perhaps not if we restrict ourselves to law rather than administrative codes), sure. But I think the scale of variation seen in the US is very much atypical

I doubt it is, when adjusted for size (of both territory and population).

I must admit that your model of a typical country seems very strange to me. It seems to correspond not even to (my model of) a US state, but to a smaller subdivision like a county or municipality. (That's the level on which you find differing policies about alcohol, for instance.)

Discuss