The City-State of New Lower Manhattan is a gargantuan, efficient nation, ruled by The Director with an iron fist, and renowned for its enslaved workforce, flagrant waste-dumping, and suspicion of poets. The hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical, humorless population of 22.254 billion Manhattanites are rabid consumers, partly through choice and partly because the government tells them to and dissenters tend to vanish from their homes at night.

The minute, corrupt, pro-business, well-organized government, or what there is of one, is effectively ruled by the Department of Defense, although Industry and Law & Order are also considered important, while Environment and Welfare aren't funded at all. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of New Lower Manhattan. Income tax is unheard of.

The frighteningly efficient Manhattanite economy, worth an astonishing 12,163 trillion NLM credits a year, is driven almost entirely by the private sector, which is broadly diversified and led by the Retail industry, with major contributions from Information Technology, Gambling, and Uranium Mining. Average income is a breathtaking 546,598 NLM credits, but there is a vast disparity between incomes, with the richest 10% of citizens earning 5,098,033 per year while the poor average 5,192, a ratio of 981 to 1.

AI chatbots generate grayscale images when asked for a picture of the truth, the alarmingly racist TV show 'Bigtopians Say the Darndest Things' is a hit, competing private ambulances racing to be the first to traffic accidents are a major cause of road accidents, and fifty years of pension funds can disappear in half a second. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown. New Lower Manhattan's national animal is the death monster, which is also the nation's favorite main course, and its national religion is none.

New Lower Manhattan is ranked 336,525^th in the world and 16,671^st in Balder for Most Cultured, scoring -279 on the Snufflebottom-Wiggendum Pentatonic Scale.