Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

The guys at PowerLine have us beat. The Minneapolis/Saint Paul combination took the #1 and #4 spots. We in Corpus Christi were barely edged out by Fort Wayne for the bottom spot. What I’m I talking about? A report in USA Today on the recent Men’s Health article identifying the smartest and dumbest cities in the country.

Smartest

• 1. Minneapolis
• 2. Boston
• 3. Denver
• 4. St. Paul
• 5. Seattle

Dumbest

• 1. Fort Wayne, Ind.
• 2. Corpus Christi, Texas
• 3. Laredo, Texas
• 4. Las Vegas
• 5. Newark

Jim and the Gang had fun with it this morning, and spoke with the morning talk-show host in Fort Wayne to compare notes.

How do you determine the dumbest and smartest cities in the USA? Matt Marion of Men’s Health says criteria include:

• Bachelor’s degrees per capita
• Residents’ SAT scores
• State creativity scores (patents per capita, for instance) as assessed by Catalytix and the Richard Florida Creativity Group
• Number of universities
• Number of Nobel Prize winners for physics and medicine born within city limits

Note: Not all criteria are weighted equally

Hmmm. I wonder what the weighting criteria were. How many cities have Nobel Laureates? Boston has both MIT and Harvard–I would guess they have a leg up on that one. Of course, they have Ted Kennedy and John Kerry to balance that just a little. Why just physics and medicine? How about Mathematics?

We have only one university, but I doubt there are many other cities of our size with more.

We have some discussion going on right now regarding schools, so the degree and SAT criteria could be significant. All in all, it is a topic for lighthearted banter more than anything else. Perhaps I’ll build my own survey and see what kind of rating I can develop. I can assure you my top five list would include only cities in Texas. Boston might hold all five of the bottom spots on their own.