The author of this article should be ashamed of himself. He failed to do basic research about how money is actually distributed. If he did, he would have found out about the Federal Reserve distribution system, the structure of which is based upon population distribution. Then he links this map to cell phone data, and then ignores the fact that cell phone towers are placed where people live — it should not be a surprise that people place local calls far more often then they do long distance calls. Then at the end of the article, he has the nerve to say "These are the first maps that are trying to paint us the way we actually are." This ignores the fact that there have been several proposals for alternative states for many years. See ‭[1] [2][3][4] (in 3, someone asks the author of one such proposal about the similarity of his plan to Federal Reserve system.)

If he wanted to do some interesting research, he would have asked to man who tracked dollar bills to ignore bills that were spent locally and instead track bills that traveled a considerable distance outside of their Federal Reserve District, because long distance cash transactions have become increasingly rare in the age of credit cards. Furthermore, that are the most likely to use cash are usually the poor, who are the least likely (except for the very rich, who don't carry cash on them at all) to use a computer and spend their time tracking where their cash has been.

[1] http://www.tjc.com/38states/

[2] http://www.rev.net/~aloe/boundary/bibliography.html#16-state

[3] http://www.rev.net/~aloe/region/question.html

[4] http://www.rev.net/~aloe/boundary/

EDIT: Added information about alternative state suggestions.

Ahem... http://www.federalreserve.gov/otherfrb.htm

Cash is managed through the regional branches of the Federal Reserve, and while there are some boundaries on that map that don't line up, it mostly seems to be governed by these particular administrative regions.

As a New Yorker from Connecticut, the gigantic barrier between New York and New England would have to be nearly completely explained by the Fed.

While everyone else discusses the uselessness of the map: shouldn't it be, "With whom do you hang?" I mean, if you're gonna use "whom," might as well not end with a preposition.

>New York City, by the same logic, sits on top of a mega-region that runs all the way to Georgia (though there are soft borders around Washington, D.C.);

It's not quite there, but this reminds me of the Sprawl:

>In William Gibson's fiction, the Sprawl is a colloquial name for the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA), an urban sprawl environment on a massive scale, and a fictional extension of the real Northeast Megalopolis.... The Sprawl is a visualization of a future where virtually the entire East Coast of the United States, from Boston to Atlanta, has melded into a single mass of urban sprawl.[1] It has been enclosed in several geodesic domes and merged into one megacity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sprawl

Previous discussion of the same map: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5457329

I wonder if this is biased by the way banks redistribute dollars. You have to think that many dollars end up at a bank, which then shifts them around to their branches and ATMs. Is it possible that this is just measuring that with some small leakage of money carried?

The dollar borders don't seem quite right. The Connected States of American seems pretty spot on to me though.

Having lived in North Jersey, Vermont, and Mississippi I can attest to cohesion of "New England", the LA/MS link, the blur of North NJ/NY and their sharp divide with South NJ/Philly.

The visualizations were interesting to look at if nothing else. I wish they had done something with the borders (maybe blurred colors) to make it a bit easier to grok the data.

I feel that with this map, yes it does show what parts of our country "hang with each other" and it is evident that these parts cross state lines. But isn't that the point of the state lines? So that you dont have any 1 certain group of people (whether they be similar related in religion, political affiliation, or ideology) living in the same place. This is why counties get redrawn now so that certain political people do not consistently hold a majority in the white house. It good that these state lines are drawn, so they we have a diversity of people representing individual states.

I wonder how much directionality the data shows. Can we get a vector field?

What's up with that sharp dividing line between Colorado and Utah? Everyone else has at least some bleed over with their neighbors. Are CO and UT economically feuding?

I wonder how much of the cash is movement is drug trafficking.

I wonder if we could see a map like this for the whole world.