smootp

Zach, what tools do you use to draw a panel? How long does a page take? And why do your people not have lower teeth? ;)

And that gets addressed in the book.

But not to worry. My understanding is in a first-to-the-finish system we have, two parties is a very stable equilibrium. If the Republican party died out, the Democratic party would almost certainly split into two opposing parties.

The Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny were well in place by the early 1800s. At that point, Europeans had been living here for 200 years. Seems plenty of time and evidence for a national identity and shared culture.

I heard an interesting argument about why Costa Rica is much safer and less violent than other central American countries. Basically, the land made it hard to create large plantations so the country never developed a culture of Spanish Jefes and oppressed natives, blacks, and mixed-race people (with all the social stratification that went with. Haiti, on the other hand, had all of that, leading to an endless cycle of oppression and revolution.

Bottom line: culture and institutions matter. A lot.

Here was my thinking. In a book, you can use thousands of words to convey a point. In Open Borders, you got maybe 100. Each word had to count. Then you had to corral Zach into conveying all the nuance and subtlety (when he wasn't drawing you sliding down a slide, which you seemed to do an awful lot). That seems a lot harder than just spewing words.

(Said the non-author who's never ever going to write anything worth publishing.)