(Bloomberg View) -- What are the U.S. counties with the mostpeople working in transportation-equipment manufacturing?

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I wondered this while working on a column about Detroit.

Thanks to the magic of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' QuarterlyCensus of Employment and Wages data viewer, I soon had an answer inthe figure below:

I've sorted here by employment in transportation equipmentinstead of a narrower category such as motor vehiclemanufacturing.

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This is because of a quirk of how the BLS releases countyemployment data: If there are so few employers in an industryin a county that one could figure out how many peoplework at one of them and how much money they make, theagency suppresses the data.

There are lots of one-auto-plant counties. By going with thebroader category, I'm less likely to miss out on them.

So Wayne County, Michigan, home of Detroit, is No. 1, and twoneighboring counties (Macomb and Oakland) rank highly. That makessense for the headquarters of the U.S. auto industry.

King County, Washington, is Seattle, and Snohomish County isjust to the north -- Boeing Co. country, in other words.

Elkhart County, Indiana, is "the RV Capital of the World."

Tarrant County (Fort Worth) is home to big General Motors Co.and Lockheed Martin Corp. plants, as well as the headquarters ofBell Helicopter Textron Inc.

And yes, headquarters staff counts, too -- this payroll data issorted by industry, not job description, which means the datadoesn't necessarily tell you where things are made.

But in most cases it's a pretty good proxy.

Sedgwick County (Wichita) is an aircraft manufacturing hub.

In San Diego County, there's ship building and aerospace.And so on.

As for Los Angeles County -- No. 2 on the list -- well, theymake everything in Los Angeles County.

Isn't this fascinating? Now, Los Angeles is the country's mostpopulous county, by far -- with Cook County (Chicago) No. 2and Harris County (Houston) No. 3.

It shouldn't be all that surprising that the counties with themost people also have the most people working in manufacturing.

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Santa Clara County is much more of an outlier. The home of (mostof) Silicon Valley is only the 17th-largest U.S. county bypopulation, but with tech giants such as Apple Inc., Cisco SystemsInc. and Intel Corp. -- and contract manufacturers Flex Ltd.and Sanmina Corp. -- headquartered there, its manufacturingemployment total is way up there.

So is the pay. The average weekly wage at manufacturingcompanies in Santa Clara County in the fourth quarter of 2016 was$4,121. In Los Angeles County, it was $1,385.

That's probably because in Santa Clara County, the employees ofmanufacturing companies are mostly designing products and figuringout how to make and sell them, not assembling them.

In Los Angeles County, people really are putting things together-- all different kinds of things.

Just because it seemed like a fun thing to do for the holidayweekend, I started looking at other broad manufacturing categories,to see where else things get made. I realize manufacturing nowaccounts for only 8.5 percent of all nonfarm payroll employment,but somehow it seems more interesting to know where the most peopleare employed making cars and airplanes than where the most areworking in finance and insurance (New York County, New York,287,651).

It really is remarkable how often Los Angeles County shows up ator near the top of the lists. Take food manufacturing, forexample (this does not include food services and drinking places,which employ 374,750 people -- nine times as many as foodmanufacturers -- in L.A. County):

It's a mix of huge urban counties andless-huge-but-still-populous counties in or near major agriculturalregions.

In apparel manufacturing, which used to be big in the ruralSouth -- and has been decimated by overseas competition, withnationwide employment in the sector falling from 938,600 in January1990 to 123,100 in May 2017 -- the bulk of the remaining workis done in big urban counties, with Los Angeles Countydominating.

And then there's my favorite, beverage manufacturing.

Except that several top beverage-manufacturing counties havetheir data suppressed for that, so I'm going with the broadercategory of beverage and tobacco product manufacturing (in whichbeverage manufacturing accounts for 95 percent of the jobs).

Want to hazard a guess as to which counties lead theway?

Neighboring Napa and Sonoma counties, headquarters of thenation's wine industry, are 1 and 2.

Stanislaus County, home of E&J Gallo Winery, is No. 4.

San Diego County, a significant wine region that also has a tonof craft breweries, is No. 5.

St. Louis, home of Budweiser, is No. 6. Budweiser parentAnheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV has breweries around the country, sothis doesn't really mean wine has displaced beer in the U.S. But itis interesting.

Oh, and of course Los Angeles County is in the top three. Itseems to be in the top three for everything. Even primary metalmanufacturing.

The area around Chicago and Gary, Indiana, which firstsurpassed the Pittsburgh area in steel production in the 1930s,remains No. 1.

But the primary metals industry in the U.S. is no longer theeconomic and employment engine it once was. U.S. iron and steelproduction, for example, peaked in the 1970s, while primary metals'contribution to U.S. gross domestic product has declined from 2.7percent in 1951 to 0.3 percent in 2016.

The chemicals industry, which includes pharmaceuticals, has notbeen shrinking as a share of GDP -- and currently is in the middleof an investment boom fueled by cheap oil and gas feedstocks.

Not surprisingly, the nation's oil and gas headquarters, HarrisCounty, is where the most chemical manufacturing workers are.

I could go on like this forever. And, really, I'm tempted to.But I just realized there's another key industry that fallsunder chemicals: explosives manufacturing. Time to gocelebrate the Fourth of July.

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