Photo by NCinDC

The D.C. area leads the United States in the newest metric cooked up by Richard Florida. The Atlantic Cities figurehead is ranking U.S. metropolitan areas by the ratio of services provided to goods produced, charting the nation’s most post-industrial regions.

The the metro area based around the District, Arlington, and Alexandria is tilted at a ratio of more than 11-to-1 of services over than goods, putting the local economy at the vanguard of a national economy that is decreasingly focused on manufacturing. As a nation, services outpace goods at about a 3-to-1 clip.

Florida’s post-industrial rankings come by way of José Lobo, an Arizona State University professor who analyzed data from the Commerce Department.

And though the East Coast is especially tilted toward the service economy, the D.C. area far outpaces the rest of the country in producing 11.17 times as much in services as it does in goods. The New York metropolitan area placed second, at 9.86.

It’s hardly shocking that an area in which government is the dominant industry is not that industrial, though D.C. was once something of an industrial hub. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, originating in Georgetown, was a critical transportation route for carrying coal from the Allegheny Mountains to the mid-Atlantic states, and provided a southern competitor to the Erie Canal running through Upstate New York.