Overzealous exercise brought me to the chiropractor's office where, while waiting for his ministrations, I took a gander at the February 2005 Men's Health. Therein, an article ranking cities as to stupidity, the measure of stupidity being the paucity of bachelor's degrees per capita. Here is a sample of the article's data, starting with the smartest and ending with the dumbest:
1. Minneapolis A+
2. Boston A+
3. Denver A+
4. St. Paul MN A+
5. Seattle A+
6. Sann Francisco A+
.
.
.
40. Phoenix C+
67. Mesa AZ C-
75. Scottsdale D+ (!?)
98. Las Vegas F
101. Fort Wayne IN F (Dead last).
Unfortunately because the study does only a per capita comparion it is rather biased against communities with large families. I suspect this is why Salt Lake City only scores a B- despite most people going to college.
Posted by: Clark Goble | Thursday, 26 May 2005 at 13:26
Good to hear from you, Clark. By the way, I'm getting a lot of traffic from your site. Thanks! Good point. Mesa, AZ, another Mormon town with large families, also scores low. What really surprised me was Scottsdale AZ. I posted the 'study' only half-seriously in any case.
Posted by: Bill Vallicella | Thursday, 26 May 2005 at 17:24
I'd expect communities with large numbers of immigrants to do poorly. I believe Arizona has that as do some of the other cities that do poorly. That's to be expected of course and perhaps not a "flaw" as such in the methadology. (Although I'm not sure saying they are dumb is fair - just uneducated) Las Vegas actually isn't a surprise at all. It apparently is a big election issue the number of drop outs. Apparently it is so easy to get jobs there that pay well without an education that many do. Although more and more managerial jobs in the casinos are requiring graduate degrees. Apparently the casinos are paying for managers to go back to school at UNLV.
Posted by: Clark Goble | Thursday, 26 May 2005 at 18:44
I wonder if UNLV is a hotbed of probability theory? Perhaps there are graduate degrees in mixology as well. . .
Posted by: Bill Vallicella | Thursday, 26 May 2005 at 19:09
1 Of course, using the number of bachelor's degrees per capita as any measure of intelligence is ludicrous. If anything, I would use it as a counter indicator. My new poster boy for autodidactism is Brad Rutter. How ironic that in an extensive and objective experiment to discover the most knowledgeable person in our country (with regard to common facts), the winner is a non-college graduate?
Posted by: Brian Ober | Friday, 27 May 2005 at 13:20
Glad to see New York City is at least not in the top six. Minneapolis is #1 with an a+,maybe Brian Ober is on to something? Does 60 yrs of sending collectivists to Congress prove intelligence?
Posted by: johnt | Saturday, 28 May 2005 at 09:42
There are stupid liberals and intelligent liberals just as there are stupid conservatives and intelligent conservatives. And the same goes for anarchists, libertarians and so on. It is a mistake to think that intelligence suffices to arrive at the correct political view. Similarly with atheism and theism. It is a mistake to think that one could be a theist only if one were lacking in intelligence or scientifically uninformed.
Posted by: Bill Vallicella | Saturday, 28 May 2005 at 11:42