The Matthew Effect and the American Senate

The San Francisco skyline: once the hub of all California

When California became a state in 1850, the legislature floated a bill that would’ve returned the state’s entire southern half to the federal government as an unorganized territory. Back then, the state’s population base centered on San Francisco, while Los Angeles and San Diego were small, distant towns. Most of the Southern California population was Spanish-speaking rancheros, whom White Californians regarded as mostly foreigners.

I didn’t know this fact until reading Bill Kauffman. Despite having spent nearly half my public-school years in various California cities, and taken multiple “love your home state” history courses, they never mentioned that early White California was so racist that they’d rather unload half the state than live with rural Mexicans as fellow Californians. Yet the older I get, the more I realize California speaks for Americans overall, in ways we shouldn’t take pride in.

A recent Vox article opens with this telling complaint: “Currently, over half the country lives in just nine states, which means that less than half of the population controls 82 percent of the Senate.” The article uses this to complain about “the malapportionment of the Senate,” a legitimate concern. But the article never questions why the population has become so concentrated. Why are America’s demographics so unequally distributed?

Media outlets, with their headquarters in the largest cities of America’s largest states, decry the unjust apportionment of Senate seats, and with them Electoral College votes, every election cycle, because that’s when the problem hits them. But they always state the question in terms of why the system treats large states so unfairly. Seldom, if ever, do they question why other states are so small. Therein, perhaps, lies the missing equation.

As a Nebraska resident, I’m downright bored hearing regular cries from legislators wanting to reverse the state’s patterns of outmigration. But they never ask why promising young strivers leave Nebraska. What will they find in, say, Chicago or Kansas City or Seattle, that they can’t find here? Anybody who’s lived in Nebraska, outside the Lincoln-to-Omaha corridor, can tell you exactly what youth hope to find elsewhere:

Work.

It’s more complex than that, certainly. People seek new experiences, an improved quality of life, and a chance to meet partners who share their values, all opportunities more readily available in large cities. But those opportunities exist, in concentrations enough to matter, in places where people have good-paying, stable employment. People flock to Manhattan, Chicago, and coastal California because these places disproportionately create America’s economic prosperity.

California's population, divided into quartiles, by geographic area. Click image for source.

Nowadays, of course, California’s population base is in L.A., and Los Angeles County’s population represents one-quarter of the state. The county has a larger population than forty-one entire states. Yet not only have California’s state lines remained unchanged since 1850, but the Los Angeles County line hasn’t moved since 1889. California’s political jurisdictions have a chillingly 19th-Century aura. We’re saddled with lines drawn during steam locomotive days.

This imbalance between Nebraska’s available space, and California’s available work, creates what sociologists call “The Matthew Effect,” the accumulation of opportunities in places where opportunities are already abundant. This flocking effect has good and bad consequences. It means young adults know where to look for lucrative, upwardly mobile work. But it also leads directly to the overbuilding which exacerbates California’s seasonal wildfires.

In the electoral field, it rewards small-state voters who elect to continue with existing, ineffective policies, over large states which favor change. The legislative and Electoral College advantages accrued by driving youth into ever-more-concentrated markets, means policies policies for change suffer crib death. In Nebraska, the corn board wants to increase ethanol production, not for environmental reasons, but to create a stable market for bloated mechanized agriculture.

The national mass media’s quadrennial whine about the unfair Senate lets journalists feel engaged and busy. But it papers over the reality: yoked with state lines that, in the Lower 48, haven’t changed since the 19th Century, ambitious young people will move to follow opportunity. They always have. If large states, like New York and California, want to reverse this trend, they need to participate in creating economic opportunity in small, substantially rural states.

I’ve historically defended America’s unfair Senate, as a place where large states must face smaller states as equals. I still believe this. But by preserving state lines unchanged since the California Gold Rush, while encouraging policies that increase geographic concentration of economic prosperity, large states have encouraged their own unfair treatment. If they’re serious about changing this trend, the policy correction needs to start closer to home.