America's Smartest Cities—From First to Worst - The Daily Beast

America's Smartest Cities—From First to Worst - The Daily Beast

A few weeks ago Tina Brown's blog The Daily Beast labeled Fresno as the dumbest city in America. Ouch. First came the jokes, then the denials (we can't possibly have a collective IQ of 3, can we?), then the hand wringing, then something else. Acceptance? Sort of. Screw them? Sort of. Hard to describe.

But read the blog. Was the index unfair? It was intended to measure community brainpower. Was it unfair that they weighted the score 35% for bachelor's degrees and 15% for advanced degrees? What else should they have chosen?

One of the real keys to looking at the index is that they selected metro areas of a million people or more. Fresno itself has about a half million people and Clovis -- more affluent and presumably more educated -- about 100,000. Where are the other 40% of the residents picked up in the study? Most, living in surrounding farming communities: farmworkers.

I don't want to pick on farm workers. They have enough heaped on their plate. But large parts of Fresno and Clovis look and feel like other parts of California -- I can walk to Starbucks, Whole Foods and even J. Crew in 10 minutes -- but huge areas of the City are deperately poor. As a society we heap scorn on the cause and effect of education and income (the Ph.D. cabdriver was legendary before he became a Senegalese cabdriver) but the correlation between education and income is undeniable. Especially now that good blue collar jobs are evaporating in the recession.

The second half of the study, I think, is what really hurts. (Actually, I shouldn't even really call it a study -- it was done by the blog staff.) Non-fiction book sales, the ratio of colleges per capita, and political engagement. We should have scored better than a 3.

Anybody upset about ending up at the bottom should read the list, especially the top ten cities or so. College towns. Research towns. High tech meccas. For the most part, their agricultural history is pretty much behind them (though I think they still grow tobacco in North Carolina). We can dream, right?

(See the articles below.)

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