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Meanwhile, in questions nobody is worrying about: why is Australia Zipfless? I'm just back from there, having been mostly in Melbourne (which is lovely), and found myself wondering about city sizes 1/
In the US, basically as far back as the data go, city sizes have followed "Zipf's Law" -- the population of a metropolitan area is roughly inversely proportional to its national rank. LA roughly half of NY, Chicago roughly 1/3, etc. But not so in Australia 2/
Here's the top 5 metros in each country, normalized as shares of their combined population. That's NY, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Houston; Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide 3/ 
So basically Melbourne too big and Sydney too small -- basically the same size; also Adelaide kind of small. Whatever the logic of Zipf in America, it doesn't seem to work down under. I don't know why, and it's far from the most pressing thing in the world, but interesting 4/
