When considering Alaska and its share of federal aid, you might more profitably look at the state’s bottom line than listen to the words of the state’s politicians.

I have just written an article examining the paradox that is Alaska, a nation-size state of about 700,000 souls where many seem to revile the federal government even as their politicians excel at reeling in and spending its money. Alaska is the top recipient of federal stimulus dollars per capita — with no close second.

You might argue that this is ever so. Alaska, as a new state with vast needs, required ports and airports and highways and so on. But then you must account for the fact that Alaska’s share of federal spending has spiked sharply in the last 15 years, even as North Slope oil revenue has filled its coffers (oil revenue accounts for 88 percent of the state’s general fund).

Some large part of the answer probably owes to two words: Ted Stevens.

A late Republican senator, he was chief of the Senate Appropriations Committee for many years, and “to earmark” became Alaska’s favorite new verb. (The Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska has much good research on the state’s economy and dependence on the federal government.)

“We’ve got this schizophrenic thing where we now claim to hate pork but love what’s coming to us,” says Anne Kilkenny, a resident of Wasilla, a suburb of Anchorage and the home of Sarah Palin. “We are by any definition a net beneficiary of the federal government.”

More provocatively, Alaskan scholars note that Alaska has benefited economically from disaster — the devastating earthquake of 1964, which all but leveled Anchorage and Valdez and other towns, persuaded President Lyndon B. Johnson to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into ports, highways and railways in Alaska. Then came the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, after which the company and the federal government also spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It was a tremendous boost,” noted Victor Fischer, who helped write the state’s constitution. “We built the state with that money.”

This is not, of itself, unusual. Louisiana and Mississippi have seen an enormous influx of federal dollars, and Mississippi in particular has used that money to reshape sections of its coast. (That state officials have done this by clearing out many of the poor and working-class residents who used to live along that coast is another matter for another day.)

And of course New York City received many billions to help it recover from 9/11 — purely in economic terms, this may have accounted for the shallowness of the last two recessions in New York.

Finally, there is a revisionist and, intentionally, deeply provocative school of thought about Alaska, which argues that for all the state’s overpowering beauty and the oil extracted from the North Slope, the United States would have been better off ceding it to Canada, or the British. David Barker, an economist who teaches at the University of Iowa, frames the question this way: “Was the Alaska Purchase a Good Deal?”

His answer: Not really.

He notes that the American West, more than any region, has been historically dependent on the federal government, and he says that Alaska fits this pattern. (The United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million. Mr. Barker notes that in 2007 dollars that’s $144 million. But then he adds another adjustment, for the relative size of the national economy, then and now, and comes up with a price tag in today’s dollars of $16.5 billion.)

Mr. Barker notes that the United States let Alaskans, as a condition of statehood, keep 90 percent of the profits from the oil fields and has drawn very little in taxes. “Total revenue from onshore oil rents and royalties from Alaska peaked in 1982 at $24 million, a small fraction of the $1.3 billion collected in internal revenue in Alaska that year,” he noted.

By contrast, he writes, Alaska is very expensive to govern. Highways, railroads, ports: All are terrifically expensive. In sum, he seems to suggest, he might give it back to Russia — in which case, former Governor Palin might find herself hunting moose with Vladimir Putin.