Oh man. This is really not helpful.
I already feel enough pressure to be as awesome as the average San Franciscan, and take enough hits to my self-esteem as a result. So, here are a few clever San Francisco thoughts (or the closest I can come to clever before finishing my coffee):
- San Francisco residents already knew this.
- This chart is going to be endlessly referenced as soon as The Big One hits.
- So SF is both smart and dense? Clearly they need more San Franciscans working for the Census.
- Suck it, New York.
It is a little intimidating. But how many of those college graduates are working three jobs unrelated to their college degree to make SF rent?
Why is it degrees / square mile? That inherently skews the graph toward more densely populated cities like NY, Boston, or SF. Chicago is a bit more sprawling, so the average degree / sq. mi drops a lot.
Wouldn’t a more interesting (and valid) way to determine the “smartness” of a city be to look at degrees per capita?
Exactly! Let’s look at the number of degree-holders as a percentage of the population, eliminate the whole extraneous variable of population density. (And then, perhaps, we can add in other factors that *are* relevant – such as population age)
except i believe NYC is denser than SF, and yet they’s dumberer.
+1. Anything other than “per capita of working-age adults” is meaningless.
Makes sense. I’m sure that in SF, they’re mostly financially-useless degrees. Liberal arts, music, etc. It would be fascinating to see the breakdown in degree types from this. By itself, number of degrees means nearly nothing.