Do we need 50 states? With the corporatocracy increasingly looking to cut costs, wouldn't it make more sense to right-size the number of 'regional' centers of democracy? With an increasingly Federally dominated US, perhaps 50 disparate decision-makers is too many. It turns out, that based on some wonderfully complex math (spatially embedded multi-scale interaction networks [3]) and data from wheresgeorge.com [4], the United States Of America is more 'optimal' from a monetary and mobility-sense if it were managed around these 8 regions. Theoretical physicist Dirk Brockmann says the borders of the United States are out of date, and as Fast Company notes [5], "no longer correlate with our behavior." By combining network theory with the travels of our dollar bills, the 'real' effective boundaries in a new USA are far simpler, reflecting where money 'stays' as opposed to more arbitrary state boundaries.
Tracking the dollars and network theory does the rest...
Where's George? Anywhere, but mostly within the confines of the "blue borders"
[6]
Finally, George-to-George tracking can be seen best in his chart of "multi-scale human mobility" showing the short and long-range connectivity patterns when it comes to the physical distance travelled by actual US Federal Reserve notes, which according to Brockmann represents "proxy for human mobility."
[7]
and the full paper behind the creation of the new 8 super-states