ext_88421 ([identity profile] krasnoludek.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] aquinasprime 2010-11-05 01:16 pm (UTC)

Nitpick about one point

I live in a state that is essentially a rural state with a small number of densely populated areas (one of which contains about half the population of the state as a whole).

While I agree with your point that it's fundamentally disrespectful that these candidates didn't visit Western NY, and that their policies should also work to keep that part of the population thriving, I disagree with using this line as justification for these points.

The characterization of NY state as "essentially" rural is based on a geographic analysis. But NY, like most states in the country (and the country itself), follows a power law distribution with respect to its population (see Zipf's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_Law)). So a vast majority of the population is located in one place, then large amounts in a couple other places, and then the remainder in smaller places. Because of the power-law nature of the distribution, even if you combine the populations of these smaller places together, they don't come close to the the populations of the top 2 or 3 places on the list. So the population in NY state is 92% urban, and 68.42% of the population is located in NYC and its immediate suburbs.(ref) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State#Population) Similarly, people in other states can and will complain about the power of the one or two big cities, such as Illinois - Chicago, California - SF+LA, Oklahoma - Oklahoma City, Georgia - Atlanta, Pennsylvania - Philly+Pittsburgh, Rhode Island - Providence, Washington - Seattle, etc. The universality of this complaint comes from the universality of the power-law distribution of population and how that concentrates the population geographically.

Since the government represents the people, not the land, its general concentration of power is also going to follow this power-law distribution. This is especially true with 1) institutions, such as the legislature, where representation is proportional to population, and 2) posts which are popularly elected. These components of the government are naturally going to favor the population centers when election season rolls around. The counteraction of this dynamic is the geographic portions of the government, namely the senate, whose power counterbalances the interests of the whole population versus the population-heavy areas. But since you're speaking of the attorney general, a popularly elected official, they are going to focus their energy on NYC and its environs because they reach a majority of the electorate that way.

Now, on a psychological and politeness level, I still think politicians should make the effort to give face time to different aspects of their electorate. And once elected to represent the state, they should be develop their policy to benefit the whole state and not just one area. But in election season, power-law distributions are going to rule the day.

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