New York is quite an average city, marginally richer than its size might predict, not very inventive and quite safe (267th in violent crime). too many banksters, in other words.

Larger cities are disproportionately the centers of innovation, wealth and crime. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. New rankings of cities and a novel and simpler perspective on urban systems emerge. We find that local urban dynamics display long-term memory, so cities under or outperforming their size expectation maintain such (dis)advantage for decades. Spatiotemporal correlation analyses reveal a novel functional taxonomy of US metropolitan areas that is generally not organized geographically but based instead on common local economic models, innovation strategies and patterns of crime.