America's Smartest Cities

Complete list by the Daily Beast.

They explain their ranking system too. It's pretty good, but of course there are some aspects to disagree with. They do take a lot of things into consideration, and they list all 55 cities / metro areas (with over 1 million people) in order, with just a smidge of snarky commentary.

woot, Denver's #5

Go Charlotte, Atlanta and Pittsburgh!
At the same time-I don't think the number of nf book sales is good measure of seeing how "smart" a city is (is the study implying that people who read mostly fiction aren't as intelligent? Also mentioned: skewed data due to faculty/students using libraries for the nf books instead of buying them).

Whichever one I'm in.

This is where I found fault too.
Maybe smart people find nonfiction boring and they want their imaginations to run wild?

I bet they lumped Livermore in there too, so they could up the number of grad degrees (what with the lab and all).

Minneapolis beat you.

i knew philadelphia was dumb, but i didn't think it was that dumb.
however, i think i might be the only guy on my block with a book.

YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH

The town that I moved away from to go to college was dead last. That made me laugh and laugh.

"'Knowing that we might be the best or one of the best on these key measures shouldn’t stop us from striving to do better,' says Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak."

By which Mr. Rybak most assuredly means:

I've honestly never known a people who so truly and so deeply love knowing where they rank on the widest variety of lists like this more than Minnesotans do. We just love it so hard.

35% of the scoring is done by nonfiction book sales and voting? that's ridiculous. especially since most of the best selling nonfiction works in recent memory have been written by people like coulter and oreilly.

Yeah, the measurements are indeed not particularly great. Why are bachelors given a higher weight than graduate if you are measuring "smartest"? Shouldn't a masters be equal to 1.5 bachelors and phD's 2x? And it doesn't mention whether there is a way of measuring multiple degrees.

I understand the reason they added nonfiction sales. but not a very accurate indicator since, as pointed out, some very unintellectual stuff is classed as "nonfiction." I am also surprised that they didn't attempt to track newspaper subscriptions, since most "smart" people like to stay informed on current events.

Printed news is dying. I read my local paper online. i don't think newspaper subscriptions would accurately depict that, seeing as that most printed news is also available online, free.

Thankfully Cleveland has Case Western Reserve.....31 isn't too bad. Three Ohio cities appeared in the top fifty.....amazing.

You could also argue that a lot of "smart" people these days are familiar with internets and get their current events info there, since internets have magic by which they are mysteriously more instant and therefore more current than the average paper publication. I've never in my life had a newspaper subscription and I'm not entirely a dumb by at least some respectable measures. If nothing else, I feel that I'm smart enough to decide that instant access to the paperless version of a publication for free (oftentimes for free, anyway) tends to beat paying for a pile of paper that'll tell me stuff that's happened only before the time it took to print and ship it to me--stuff about which I could otherwise have learned instantly elsewhere.

And as to the other point of yours, I do think that there's a valid argument to be made that such lines exists in terms of educational quantity after whose crossing it can be said that you're nowhere near twice as "smart," or even 1.5 times as "smart," as you were prior to the crossing of said line. The difference in education and knowledge base between a high school grad and a college grad, in my opinion, is greater and more notable than the difference between a master's degree holder and a PhD holder--and far more notable than the difference between the holder of one PhD and the holder of two.

See? The first of my two points as noted above has been anecdotally supported already, by another friend of internets and their magically free, near-instantaneous supply of news-item-things.

Part me wants to say "Suck it, LA!" while part of me wants to know how they decided to merge cities. San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose all get lumped together, but Baltimore and DC get split? And I admit to knowing nothing about Michigan, but Battle Creek/Kalamazoo/Grand Rapids?

11/55 is not bad at all. You can find dumb people everywhere you go, all around the world.

I used to live in Michigan (though only for a few years) but I consider those 3 separate places. However, I also use to live in "San Francisco" which as has been noted is comprised of several areas that could be considered separate.

I'm not sure where they decided to draw the line at "metro areas."

Chicago is #24? doesn't really surprise since we have a MORON for a mayor.

LOL Phoenix ranked at #49

The photo for Boston is of Red Sox fans. Priceless.

I'm aware of the fate of print media. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be tracked. There are also certain news papers that actually have online subscriptions, which can be tracked. The measure isn't perfect, because you can't include people that only get their news from television accurately either. The point is more that they are making an attempt to account for it.

For a data set like this, Coulter and O'Reilly aren't necessarily that bad, but think about something like "The Secret." I really don't see a correlation between sales of that book and intelligence of any kind.

#9

Dammit! Seattle beat us.