Open Thread, November 23-30, 2013

passive_fist

6Viliam_Bur12y

My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws. These differences allow people to do some lower-scale experiments, and probably allow an individual to feel like a more important part of the whole (one in a few thousands feels better than one in a few millions). I would guess this division to regions is very important. So a question is, if we wanted to "Switzerland-ize" a larger country, should we aim for the same size (population) or the same number of regions? Greater region size may reduce the effect of an individual feeling important, but greater number of regions could make the interactions among them more complicated. Or maybe the solution would be to have regions and sub-regions, but then it is not obvious (i.e. cannot be copied straightforwardly) what should be the power relationship between the regions and their sub-regions. It would be safer to try this experiment first in a country of a similar size. Just in case some Illuminati are reading this discussion, I volunteer Slovakia for this experiment, although my countrymen might disagree. Please feel free to ignore them. :D

A1987dM12y20

Switzerland is pretty small, and it's not obvious to me that its political system would scale well to larger countries. But then again, it's not obvious to me that it wouldn't, either.

A1987dM12y00

Then again, population-wise it's bigger than reactionary poster children such as Singapore or Monaco and comparable to progressivist poster children such as Sweden or Denmark.