Rank your MSA's counties by relevance/importance

[Steely Dan]

as most of you probably know, i'm not the world's biggest proponent of the CB's county mash-up game for delineating MSAs, so let's say that you were charged with peeling some counties off from your city's MSA, which ones would be the first to go?

rank them from most to least relevant/important.



chicago's bloated MSA now consists of 14 counties (9 in IL, 4 in IN, and 1 in WI). a handful of them are giant cornbelt counties with low populations that send just enough people over county lines to meet commuter thresholds for inclusion, but otherwise have no business being included in the metro area.


here's how I'd rank the counties of Chicago's MSA:

1. cook
2. dupage
3. lake (IL)
4. will
5. kane
6. lake (IN)
7. mchenry
8. kendall
9. kenosha
10. porter
11. grundy
12. dekalb
13. newton
14. jasper


#1 is 100% irrefutable for blatantly obvious reasons; cook not only holds the city of chicago, it also contains 54.8% of the MSA's total population all by itself!

the rest are open to some debate. though i feel very confident about my bottom 7 overall, even if others might nit-pick my specific ordering of some of them.

if all 7 of the bolded were cleaved from the MSA, it wouldn't change a great deal. collectively they only hold 673K people, or just 7.0% of the MSA's total pop.



aside: i wish that the two lake counties would have been more original with their names. it can be mildly confusing that cook county is bookended on both its northern and southeastern borders by two different counties both named "lake".