Sunday, October 11, 2009

Milwaukee Passes Daily Beast IQ Test

The Daily Beast posted the results of its, "America's Smartest Cities, From First to Worst". In the analysis they tried to rank the largest 55 cities in America by intelligence. They only considered cities with metropolitan areas consisting of one million or more people. Here is the data that they examined on a per-captia basis:
  • bachelor's and graduate degrees
  • nonfiction book sales
  • ratio of institutions of higher education
  • political engagement

Obviously these kinds of projects are not fool proof but they are interesting nonetheless. After crunching the numbers, the Daily Beast ranked Milwaukee 15th smartest of the 55 largest cities in the country. Your welcome Wisconsin! First went to Raleigh-Durham, fourth went to the Twin Cities, Chicago and St. Louis were tied for 24th place. Some of the lowest ranking cities included Dallas-Fort Worth, Memphis, Louisville, San Antonio, and dead last went to Fresno California. They gave the following comments regarding Milwaukee's 15th place ranking:

The Milwaukee area is renowned more for its breweries than its smarts.
Rounding out the top 15 on our list may undermine that stereotype. Milwaukee did
well in the universities per-capita category and was also above average for
voter participation.

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2 comments:

Michael Horne said...

I did an analysis of the 15 smartest v. 15 dumbest cities and plotted them against a liberal - conservative scale based on electoral results of about 200 cities, ranked liberal low number, conservative high number. None of the 15 smartest cities were over 100, while the average of the dumb cities was over 100.

5:14 PM
Cory Liebmann said...

interesting...got a link for that one? i must have missed it.

5:18 PM

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