The Desert Community of Night Vale is a huge, efficient nation, ruled by Cecil Gershwin Palmer with an iron fist, and remarkable for its enslaved workforce, parental licensing program, and compulsory gun ownership. The hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical, humorless, devout population of 971 million Listeners are ruled with an iron fist by the corrupt, dictatorship government, which oppresses anyone who isn't on the board of a Fortune 500 company. Large corporations tend to be above the law, and use their financial clout to gain ever-increasing government benefits at the expense of the poor and unemployed.

The relatively small, corrupt, moralistic, well-organized government juggles the competing demands of Defense, Law & Order, and Spirituality. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Night Vale Community Radio Station. Citizens pay a flat income tax of 18.6%.

The frighteningly efficient Night Vale economy, worth 116 trillion bloodstones a year, is broadly diversified and led by the Retail industry, with major contributions from Arms Manufacturing, Beef-Based Agriculture, and Uranium Mining. Black market activity is frequent. Average income is an impressive 120,327 bloodstones, but there is a vast disparity between incomes, with the richest 10% of citizens earning 823,733 per year while the poor average 6,330, a ratio of 130 to 1.

Chest pains are considered part of the dining experience in Night Vale restaurants, environmental protestors are being rounded up and taken away in sinister black vans as a massive land development campaign gets underway, biker gangs and fashionistas are converting to Violetism en masse, and a survey of the nation's rivers and children has shown that pesticide levels are at an all-time regional high. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to a well-funded police force. Night Vale's national animal is the Floating Cat, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation.

Night Vale is ranked 290,880^th in the world and 9^th in Wasteland for Most Advanced Public Education, scoring -18.44 on the Edu-tellignce® Test Score.