IN FACT, 10 MILLION IS NEAR THE CUT-OFF FOR MOST SUCCESSFUL NATIONS:

Radically rethinking L.A. County: The 10-million-strong county has outgrown its government (LA Times, February 25, 2007)

[L]os Angeles County, with its five supervisors each representing 2 million people, has become nearly ungovernable with its outdated structure. The one thing supervisors excel at is repelling challengers to their seats. The last time an incumbent was voted out of office, astonishingly, was in 1980, when Mike Antonovich defeated Baxter Ward. So whose fault is it today when patients are mistreated at the former King/Drew Medical Center and voters refuse to hold their supervisor accountable? Is it the voters' fault? Or is there something wrong with the structure?

Consider the dysfunctional relationship between the county and city of Los Angeles, whose budget is a third the size of the county's. A city program to crack down on gang crime means that the county supervisors and sheriff will have to find more room in the jails, more money for prosecutors, more funding for deputy public defenders, more space in the probation system. A ward of the county's juvenile hall system will run a gantlet of potentially worthy services: mental health, foster care, education -- but all of it provided by different agencies, funded by different budgets, headed by leaders not answerable to the same single executive. The opportunities for waste, suspicion and failure are endless.

The county government -- at least the design of its leadership structure -- remains moored to the pretense that its mission is simply to act as an outpost of the state. Hence, there are only five supervisors exercising quasi-executive, quasi-legislative authority. There is no one really in charge, exercising full executive authority.

The county government can do better. But to do better, it needs to be reshaped. The supervisors are taking a necessary first step, preparing to ask voters to turn the chief administrator into an actual executive with the power to hire and fire department chiefs. It's a step short of a move that Supervisor Zev Yaroslavksy has pushed -- creating an elected county executive -- and a majority of Yaroslavsky's colleagues agreed to go forward only after realizing that no one, for any amount of money, had the qualifications and the desire to replace retiring Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen. But it's a move in the right direction.

For decades, committees of civic do-gooders and deep-thinking academic experts have drafted reports on how to fix things. Those reports have sat on shelves, gathering dust. Now that county supervisors have begun to grapple with their limitations and embrace plans for a more powerful executive, it's time to decide what might work better for the county's residents. Break the county into three? Merge it with the city? Demand more local control over tax revenue?

Democracy may be sacrosanct, but its current format in Los Angeles County isn't.

MORE:
Golden State may be blinded by its luster: California slipping in rate of growth and in job creation (Joel Kotkin, February 25, 2007, SF Chronicle)

The state rate of GDP growth over the past decade has been strong, ranking fourth in the nation, but California has been losing ground in the new millennium. In 2004-05, it fell to 17th, behind not only fast-growing Arizona and Nevada but also Oregon, Washington and rival "nation-state" Texas.

Job creation has been even less impressive. In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, it can only be considered mediocre or worse. If not for the strong performance of the interior counties of the state -- what Bill Frey and I call the "Third California" -- the state already would be rightly considered a laggard when it comes to creating employment.

More disturbing, as California's population has grown -- largely from immigration -- per-capita income growth has weakened. From the 1930s to as late as the 1980s, Californians generally got richer faster than other Americans. In 1946, Gunther reported, Californians enjoyed the highest living standards and the third-highest per-capita income in the country.

Today, California ranks 12th in per-capita income. And it's losing ground: Between 1999 and 2004, California's per-capita income growth ranked a miserable 40th among the states. [...]

Parallel to these developments, California is losing its once broad middle class, the traditional source of its political ballast and much of its entrepreneurial genius. Outmigration from the state is growing and, contrary to the notions of some sophisticates, it's not just the rubes and roughhouses who are leaving.

Indeed, an analysis of the most recent migration numbers shows a disturbing trend: an increasing out-migration of educated people from California's largest metropolitan areas. Back in the 1990s, this was mostly a Los Angeles phenomena, but since 2000, the Bay Area appears to be suffering a high per-capita outflow of educated people.

A look at data from the 2004-05 American community survey, these emigrants include many workers in technology, arts, finance, science, management, high-end sales and medicine -- the creative class. Perhaps the only saving grace is that some migrants are still staying in California, largely in the Sacramento and Inland Empire regions.

This middle class flight is likely driven by two things: greater opportunities outside the state and the cost of housing in-state.