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Oh I know, but I am just not sure how anyone would find statistics to back any of this up. Perhaps museum attendance, but that’s about it.
College education rates? Having a college education does not translate to how much one listens to NPR, nor how many books one reads, or any level of intellectual curiosity. So using the education levels of each city does not really measure these things. And quite frankly, there are many people that what most would considered great schools but lack all intelligence or curiosity about the world. That is proven daily on Twitter. There are also countless people in all of these cities who do not have a piece of paper on their wall who listen to NPR, read daily, and probably more worldly than a good portion of the “educated” group.
Library use rates? That just tells us how many books are checked out of a library system, not what kind of books are checked out of a library system. Perhaps they are all copies of Fifty Shades of Gray.
As for gauging areas where the populace is open to trying new things? How does one track that and gauge which things count as being valuable for this determination or not?
Amazon released their annual list of the top 20 most well-read cities across the US (AKA where we’re Googling apartments to rent RN). Compiling sales data from cities with more than 500,000 residents on a per capita basis, Amazon analyzed the purchases of all books, magazines and newspapers in both Kindle and print from April 2015 to April 2016 to find the most well-read cities across America.
1. Seattle
2. Portland
3. Washington, D.C.
4. San Francisco
5. Austin
6. Las Vegas
7. Tucson
8. Denver
9. Albuquerque
10. San Diego
I thought the blurb on Vegas was funny - Although you probably thought Las Vegas was more of a gambler’s paradise than a literary den, this rock ‘n’ roll city is actually one of Amazon’s highest grossing spots when it comes to books. Yes, Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey As Told by Christian ($8) might be the top selling Kindle title in the city, but what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?
Top 3 for this in some order is for sure Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. If you're going to go into the whole prestigious university debate, then Chicago and Philadelphia top 2 IMO but Atlanta and Pittsburgh no slouch in that category either with universities like Emery and Carnegie Melon. Rice in Houston great too. Phoenix is the only city/MSA in this poll that doesn't have a top university really.
With that being said, intellectualism goes well beyond whether you have a college degree or not. This has been discussed on this site ad nauseam before too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Maintainschaos
I guess Chicago or Philadelphia (I think Chicago has the higher % of college age grads of the two, but I can’t seem to find the stat right now). That being said, I don’t think of these cities as a whole embody this characteristic, especially for cities as large as Chicago, Houston, Philly, etc.
City wise, Chicago has the highest college educated percentage of the top 7 largest cities in the US. MSA wise, Chicago has a slightly higher percentage than Philadelphia.
2018 Bachlor's Degree or Higher by MSA
Atlanta MSA: 39.4%
Chicago MSA: 38.5%
Philadelphia MSA: 38.1%
Pittsburgh MSA: 35.5%
Houston MSA: 33.1%
Phoenix MSA: 31.9%
Oh I know, but I am just not sure how anyone would find statistics to back any of this up. Perhaps museum attendance, but that’s about it.
College education rates? Having a college education does not translate to how much one listens to NPR, nor how many books one reads, or any level of intellectual curiosity. So using the education levels of each city does not really measure these things. And quite frankly, there are many people that what most would considered great schools but lack all intelligence or curiosity about the world. That is proven daily on Twitter. There are also countless people in all of these cities who do not have a piece of paper on their wall who listen to NPR, read daily, and probably more worldly than a good portion of the “educated” group.
Library use rates? That just tells us how many books are checked out of a library system, not what kind of books are checked out of a library system. Perhaps they are all copies of Fifty Shades of Gray.
As for gauging areas where the populace is open to trying new things? How does one track that and gauge which things count as being valuable for this determination or not?
Frankly, you make a very good point.
In general, statistics tell you less than meet the eye about a place or its attributes on just about every measure where subjective judgment can come into play (and that includes quality of the local schools), and while "the plural of anecdote is not data," in such spheres, you can indeed pick up some useful insights from anecdotes, especially those that point to the possible existence of people who may portend future change or counter common stereotypes.
And most of the numbers we can complile - college or higher degree-holders, book purchases, library circulation data, musuem attendance, attendance at classical music performances, and so on - serve here as proxies for what we want to know rather than what we want to know. To know that, you basically have to spend time somewhere and get a feel for the place and how people in it behave.
As I said at the beginning, none of these five cities really have reputations for intellectualism. Three of them (Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh) have more workaday/blue-collar images than they do bookish/academic ones - but all three have neighborhoods where academe dominates and significant intellectual ferment. I would say that Phoenix is the one true outlier in this group.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ebck120
Here's one take...... just for fun
Amazon released their annual list of the top 20 most well-read cities across the US (AKA where we’re Googling apartments to rent RN). Compiling sales data from cities with more than 500,000 residents on a per capita basis, Amazon analyzed the purchases of all books, magazines and newspapers in both Kindle and print from April 2015 to April 2016 to find the most well-read cities across America.
(snippage)
Was this all purchases as reported by the American Booksellers Association and Audit Bureau of Circulation, or just Amazon data?
This is a common problem in doing this by the numbers: choosing where the numbers come from. If my suspicions here are correct, these stats are akin to median or average apartment rent figures released by the major apartment search sites, all but one of which rely on units that appear in their databases. These tend to skew upwards from the overall rental market. Apartment List, which uses Census American Community Survey data in addition to its own figures and crunches the numbers using methodology similar to what S&P Case-Shiller uses for its house price indices, is the one exception to this rule.
For a truer statistical gauge of how well-read a city is, we'd have to include non-Amazon book and periodical purchases, periodical subscriptions and library circulation.
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