THE other night I was out drinking with a development economist currently working on a paper about the relationship between religiosity and modernisation, and he mentioned a familiar problem. "Somebody," he said, "has got to explain the United States." Compared to other countries, America is much more religious than one might expect, based on wealth, educational levels, political systems and so forth. This is one of a number of metrics on which America is a weird outlier among nations. One way people often describe the American chimera is to call it a cross between northern Europe and Latin America.

That's the framework Jonathan Cohn used in his piece in the New Repubiic earlier this month, "Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala". As Mr Cohn writes, the "blue states" in America's Northeast and West Coast, which tend to vote Democratic, also tend to be wealthier and to have more extensive social insurance, public health and education systems. The "red states" of the South, lower Midwest and mountain West, which mainly vote Republican, are generally poorer and spend less on social insurance, public health and education. In fact, Mr Cohn writes, it's not really clear why voters in blue states want to maintain strong national (as opposed to state-level) social spending programs that disproportionately benefit red states:

If Rick Perry wants to strip the Texas welfare state bare, why should voters in Maine or Oregon care? If anything, the blue states would probably benefit from such a move. Since red states have more poor people, and since their state governments spend less money on the safety net, they receive a larger share of federal funds...Looked at this way, the red states are the moochers and the blue states are the makers.

Matthew Yglesias takes this point to the next level by comparing America to the EU. Unlike the EU, the United States can maintain political support for permanent large transfers of funds from rich states to poor states because we have a "nationwide ideological vision. People who favor transfer payments and social programs for the poor don't care that this disproportionately entails sending money out of San Francisco and to Kentucky. This gives the country a resilience in the face of external shocks that Europe lacks. The agenda of the Dutch Labor Party is that there should be a strong welfare state for Dutch people, not that the relatively affluent Dutch should be taxed for the benefit of relatively poor Portugal."

This is all quite true, but the comparison to the EU also underlines Mr Cohn's point that America really is quite mysterious. After all, the poorer states in Europe (Greece, Spain) that are receiving transfer payments from richer ones generally share a European-style commitment to generous social safety nets—too generous for their income levels, the Germans and Dutch would say. Indeed, what Germany and the Netherlands are trying to do by forcing Greece to balance its budget and slash public salaries, pensions and social spending is essentially to force Greece to become Alabama. But the poor American states that receive transfer payments tend to oppose generous safety nets in the first place. There's no need to force Alabama to become Alabama; it already wants to be Alabama, however misguided people in Massachussetts may believe that to be.

This seems like a happy ideological coincidence. One would think that the easy solution to the American argument over levels of social spending would be for Massachussetts to go ahead and be Scandinavia, spending a lot on anti-poverty income support, public health, and schools, while letting Alabama go ahead and be Guatemala, with substandard schools, deep pockets of poverty, terrible public-health statistics and so forth. The risk would be that generous social welfare policies would induce lots of poor people to leave Alabama and move to Massachussetts, but in fact Massachussetts has had the country's only universal health insurance system for six years now, courtesy of Mitt Romney, and it doesn't seem to have led to a budget-busting influx of poor immigrants. On the other hand, RomneyCare depends on federal Medicaid funding to handle poor residents, and turning that funding into stingy block-grants, as Mr Romney currently proposes, might destroy the system. So maybe this level of devolution would create a downward spiral of adverse selection, and wouldn't ultimately work. As the country's political and regional polarisation continues, though, it seems more and more likely that some version of a Scandinavia-Guatemala federalist split is what it will get.