An article about the analysis of monetary flows in the continental states of the U.S. tells us, “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.” These mathematical analyses result in 8 such regions where “money stays.” The resulting map can be found in the article: The 8 United States Of A New Monetary America. There is also a link at an open-access science website to download the article summarizing the mathematical analysis. This study looked at the regions as replacements for the 50 states in a continuously existing United States, but I’ll shift to the idea that these regions might well define sovereign nations—at least until processes of federation produce a more coherent republic at a larger scale.
What I find interesting is that the regions correspond well to those proposed by a Russian academic, Igor Panarin, who proposed in the 1990s that the United States is politically incoherent and would collapse as a nation and form into regional nations—see As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S. . It also corresponds to regions I’ve seen proposed, seriously and tongue-in-cheek at the same time, because of cultural differences within the United States. For a variety of reasons, I’ve also claimed that a similar breakup of the United States into such regions would produce more coherent political systems and also more coherent cultures. Once able to live as independent political and economic and cultural communities, those regions would, in my opinion, be wise to move toward a smoother integration into a North American or even western hemisphere federation.
Powerful armies and predatory banks can both be used, and arguably are being used in Europe and the United States, to protect centralized powers which would be endangered by even the attempt to reorganize countries or institutions so that they are more coherent, in both structural ways and dynamic (narrative) ways.
I would emphasize that a federation still larger than the United States makes good sense and would seem a logical development in a world I believe to be the story of the formation of the Body of Christ, an all-inclusive human civilization in which the most important organ is the Catholic Church. Under this viewpoint, the end-point in this mortal realm would be a Christian civilization which includes the entirety of the human race as well as a bewildering network of networks of nations and worship communities not fully under the ecclesiastical hierarchy, of educational institutions and symphony orchestras, of businesses and nature clubs, of extended families and urban neighborhoods,
For a discussion of how I think human communities should develop, see Conservative Politics in light of Evolutionary and Developmental Processes. Don’t expect a description of desirable communities nor a recipe of how to build an allegedly good community. Human communities are more like organisms than machines, potentially like a world in the sense of a coherent narrative and not like an engineered building. Clearly, no one intended for these regions of more coherent cultures, regions which also are where the “money stays” to develop. No government agencies regulate them and their cultures or flows of money. In fact, government agencies try to encourage or even force the homogenization of culture and economy on the national level.
These regions developed despite the desires of the American central powers. They developed because of developmental processes involving both individual human beings and small communities of human beings and the way they interact with others.