Phoenix scrapes the bottom of the Smartest Cities list

The Daily Beast, the HuffPost knock off headed up by Tina Brown, took a little initiative and had someone chart some of the data out there regarding intellectual life and American’s largest cities. The chief researcher, Clark Merrefield, took into account factors like non-fiction book sales, percentage of residents with college degrees, institutions of higher education and so forth.

The result is punishing for the Sun Belt in general and Phoenix in particular. Raleigh-Durham came in first, followed by the Bay Area, Boston, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Denver.

Phoenix comes in at 49—barely, as the compiler gleefully points out, missing the bottom five of the 55 cities analyzed. Tucson’s at 34.

Here’s a graf describing some of the data:

[After weighting for population] we divided the criteria into two halves: Half for education, and half for intellectual environment. The education half encompassed how many residents had bachelor’s degrees (35 percent weighting) and graduate degrees (15 percent). No credit was given for “some college,” or “some grad school”—we rewarded those who finished the race. The intellectual environmental half had three subparts. First, we looked at nonfiction book sales (25 percent), as tracked by Nielsen BookScan, the nation’s leading provider of accurate point-of-sale data, which tracks roughly 300,000 titles each week. We focused on nonfiction as an imperfect proxy for intellectual vigor, because overall sales are dominated by fiction works that, while entertaining, aren’t always particularly thought-provoking. We also measured the ratio of institutions of higher education (15 percent), as defined by the federal government—different than just measuring college degrees, this acknowledges that universities don’t just churn out diplomas, but instead drive the intellectual vigor of cities. Finally, many studies link intelligence and political engagement, so we weighed this, too, as measured by the percentage of eligible voters who cast ballots in the last presidential election (10 percent). (Our relatively small weighting acknowledges that numerous other local factors can affect turnout.)

Entire story here. The commentors raise some interesting points.