Back in the late 1970s, when I worked for Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan, our office followed the changing data about the Empire State closely. It was a habit of Pat Moynihan’s, indeed almost an obsession, to chart the state’s decline.

As a senator, he was especially interested in its representation in Congress. In 1850, New York’s 33 members of the House of Representatives comprised 14 percent of the entire House, and even as late as 1940, when Pat was a boy, the figure was still 10 percent: 45 members out of the total of 435. Today, after the census of 2010, New York has only 27 Representatives in the House—a mere 6 percent of the whole.