A map presented by Samuel Arbesman showing
states that are dominated by single metropolitan areas:
For example, the state of Illinois is a city-state because, despite its large physical area, two-thirds of its population lies within the counties that make up the Chicago metropolitan area... These are the fourteen states (plus the District of Columbia) where over the half the population of that individual state lies within a single metropolitan area...
More generally, these city-states don’t fit a single category in my mind: they are on both coasts as well as being landlocked, and encompass the non-contiguous states of Alaska and Hawaii.
More discussion at the link, along with the numerical data for each state (MN = 59%, WI = 27.6%). Further commentary at
Yglesias, who notes -
I think this is mostly a glance at how poorly designed our currently political boundaries are. The definition of a metropolitan area is bound to be somewhat arbitrary around the margin, but these are real social and economic phenomena. But we make important political decisions at the state level. That’s not just state government, it’s senators and the electoral college as well. Some states—California, Texas, Florida—are way too big and encompass multiple major metro areas... There’s a huge continuous swath of land in Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming that gets ten senators and has fewer residents than the Detroit MSA which doesn’t even get to dominate a single state.
Something worth noting is that while overrepresentation of low population states was obviously part of the original constitutional bargain for a reason, this is a different phenomenon. Late 18th century America was such an overwhelmingly rural country that the whole question would have been irrelevant. Meanwhile, some of the metro-dominated states are also low-population states.
The converse way to frame this is why would we allow the people of the Boston to Washington DC corridor run national politics that affect a land mass of more than 75% of the country that they have never been to, don't intend to ever visit, and know nothing about.
ReplyDeleteLet New York, Texas, and California run the House but for Pete's sake leave the Senate alone.
Rhode Island media sometimes refer to ourselves as "the city state." It's a term I hadn't heard since grade school, when learning about Luxembourg.
ReplyDeleteInteresting to compare that map with the city spheres of influence as expressed by their inhabitants here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.commoncensus.org/maps.php
That's a very interesting map, Reader.
ReplyDeleteHow well I remember growing up in upstate NY (near the Canadian border), and finding that our politics was dominated by a city 350 miles away, which had half the population of the state. It always felt like two completely different states.
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