Declining Metro Areas

[badrunner]

Originally Posted by Yuri

That's a poor example you chose. You were the one using 1950 Census metro area definition and applied it to the 5x smaller 1920 Los Angeles. In the thread, a forumer was posting the proto metro area definition, the "metropolitan district", used by the US Census between 1910-1940 and that it was not county-based.

The said forumer simply forgot to post Los Angeles numbers and I speculated they probably included only some parts of LA County and nothing of OC. Later another forumer confirmed my guessing, posting that US Census Bureau gave 831k inh. for 1920 Los Angeles as opposed to 932k of LA or 997k of LA+OC.

This is totally wrong, and I suspect you are being intentionally dishonest here. The census bureau gave a figure of 879k which is a lot closer to the retroactive county based number than it is to your initial guess of 700k. By 1930 the county based number and the metro "district" number are virtually identical at 2.3m which shows the validity of retroactively using the county based number for this particular metro. So no, the other forumer did not confirm your "guessing." In fact, it turned out you were wrong on all counts. You said the metro shouldn't include Orange County. Not only did the census bureau include most of Orange County, it also included parts of San Bernardino County. In some ways it's even more expansive a metro area definition than today's MSA.

Originally Posted by Yuri

And back to this thread, I brought numbers for Pittsburgh from 1890 way up to 2020.

Yes, back to this thread. You still haven't explained why your methodology for calculating metro areas has seemingly done a 180 in a couple of days. There is no consistency, no logic to it. It's just whatever it needs to be for your agenda at the time. I'll stick to the census bureau definitions, imperfect as they may be.

Originally Posted by Yuri

Several definitions were used by the Census Bureau between 1950 and 2020; 4 counties back then; 7 today. I made a compromise and picked up 5.

Why do any of that?

Originally Posted by Yuri

Since the 1950's at least, Butler was clearly a booming suburb of Pittsburgh, hence I included it.

So you included it under a false premise.

Originally Posted by Yuri

And the two counties of the MSA I decided to drop here:

Armstrong: -4,91% -4,77%
Fayette: -5,71% -8,10%

Why? This seems totally arbitrary.