Tumblr Icon RSS Icon  Our Unmetro Politics  By Matthew Yglesias
on February 7, 2011 at 4:28 pm  "Our Unmetro Politics"   google
plus icon  Samuel Arbesman offers us the “city states of
America”, a map of states that have over half of their
population living in a single metropolitan statistical area:  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. Then you get
things like Philadelphia. Six million people live in this
metropolitan area, more than live in most states. But there’s no
state government where their interests dominate. Instead they’re
divided between the NYC-focused state of Ne