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Originally Posted by iheartthed
I don't quite agree with this framing. NYC and Chicago, yes. They have been in the top 3 for 130 years. But L.A. didn't officially join the top 3 until the 1950s. There are many people still alive today that were breathing before L.A. became a top 3 city. A few are still around that witnessed it leap into the top 5.
Another interesting thing to note is that L.A. has occupied the #2 slot for about as long as Chicago did. Philadelphia held the #2 slot far longer, and I don't think there's an immediate threat to L.A., but if history holds then we might have a new #2 within the next 2-3 decades.
source: https://www.peakbagger.com/pbgeog/histmetropop.aspx |
The numbers used in this graph are apples to oranges comparisons depending on the year because of the underlying methodology. The person here is open about this, stating that they use cities, counties, and urban areas depending on the census year and they also make ad hoc combinations that are driven by a prioris rather than sticking to the underlying data.
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The end results are, at best, educated wild guesses. This is not a serious academic reseach project and my methodology would not hold up to peer-review scrutiny. This means that no number above should be considered 100% accurate, and most city rankings are within plus or minus 2 slots, at best. There are simply too many judgement calls that went into the methodology--which cities were part of which metro areas, what percentage of a county's population was urban, what counties are part of which metro areas, and so on. But I think it does give a reasonably accurate big-picture view of the changing fortunes in America's urban landscape.
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What the author is saying here, correctly, is:
be careful how you interpret the data here, and be cautious with the words you choose so that you do not claim too much.
The author would likely say that the data cannot support the bold assertion that the Los Angeles MSA became top 3 in 1950. Firstly, the author expressly does not use MSAs. Secondly, the ad hoc decisions the author made (without a full list of those decisions) make comparisons harder so we can’t be sure it was top 3 in their data. We can be sure that it was one of the largest, however. Top 5, at minimum. Thirdly, because they use different data for different years, we also can’t be sure about 1950 either—so let us build in some error to your analysis (and give it some color):
This data presentations suggests that the current second most populated city-based region in the country, Los Angeles and it’s surroundings, developed into one of the top five largest population centers during the period from 1920 until 1970, competing during this time period with cities (and their surroundings) such as Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco. Since 1970, 20 years after the advent of “metropolitan statistical areas,” Los Angeles has remained as yet uneclipsed as the second most populated city-dominated urban region of the United States both in the census data and by this author’s judgment.