sci-fi story setting idea: a future where VR becomes so widespread that where you live physically in the US becomes more of a formality than of actual consequence, so mass internal migrations a la Free State Project occur as people rush to move to low population states to get more political influence in a federal political system that is increasingly impossible to reform
Wouldn’t that require all states to have identical laws, taxes, etc on residents? It seems likely to me that people care a lot more about those than differential influence on federal politics.
Edit: More precisely, a story in which most people do not care at least an order of magnitude more about laws on residents than on changing their federal political representation from 0.0000001 to 0.0000002 would strain my suspension of disbelief. People who care that much more about federal politics are much more likely to do something other than just move to another state to get microscopically more influence in very infrequent votes for representatives. If a large fraction of the population feels that way and the federal politics is extremely resistant to change, you probably get revolution or civil war, not mass migration to change vote strength.
sci-fi story setting idea: a future where VR becomes so widespread that where you live physically in the US becomes more of a formality than of actual consequence, so mass internal migrations a la Free State Project occur as people rush to move to low population states to get more political influence in a federal political system that is increasingly impossible to reform
Wouldn’t this just lead to an equilibrium where every state has an about equal population super quickly though?
Only if housing can be built.
Wouldn’t that require all states to have identical laws, taxes, etc on residents? It seems likely to me that people care a lot more about those than differential influence on federal politics.
Edit: More precisely, a story in which most people do not care at least an order of magnitude more about laws on residents than on changing their federal political representation from 0.0000001 to 0.0000002 would strain my suspension of disbelief. People who care that much more about federal politics are much more likely to do something other than just move to another state to get microscopically more influence in very infrequent votes for representatives. If a large fraction of the population feels that way and the federal politics is extremely resistant to change, you probably get revolution or civil war, not mass migration to change vote strength.