Response to Naming Glen Cove the '10th Dumbest City in New York'

After RoadSnacks named Glen Cove the No. 10 dumbest city in New York, the rankings created quite a buzz.

One Glen Cove resident, Flip Pidot, took it upon himself to dissect the rankings and challenge the website’s accuracy and methodology.

The gauntlet has been thrown.

Do you still think Glen Cove is dumb?

Read Pidot’s full response below:

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The intellectual output of clickbait farm RoadSnacks consists of various boilierplate listicles thinly disguised as meaningful scientific rankings (e.g. the 10 Most Bible Thumping Cities In North Carolina, or The Top 10 Cities For Cholos In California). One of their latest thinkpieces aims to identify the 10 “dumbest” cities in New york.

In its condemnation of Glen Cove as the 10th dumbest statewide, RoadSnacks said:

“Located on the North Shore of Long Island, Glen Clove (sic) is the last city to make the dumb list for New York.

“20.5% of Glen Cove’s adult population do not possess a high school diploma, and 9.8% of the city’s teenagers drop out of high school each year; both of these rates rank in the worst 15% for cities in New York.

“So this is one of the last places in New York that you’d want to start a Book Of The Month Club.”

Leave aside for a minute the fact that our ostensibly chowderheaded city has yielded titans of industry like J.P. Morgan, F.W. Woolworth, Merrill Lynch founder Edmund Lynch, and Loews Cineplex Entertainment founder Marcus Loew; countless composers, authors, directors, and artists; Olympians, a 2-time Medal of Honor recipient, and the inventor of the roller coaster (you’re welcome, world).

And never mind that Glen Cove has a higher percentage of residents with professional graduate school degrees and a higher percentage of residents with PhDs than the rest of New York State (per http://city-data.com/zips/11542.html).

No, it’s RoadSnacks’ unrigorous methodology itself that most readily exposes the flaws in its rankings. (I get that these frivolous pieces are in fact meant to be unrigorous and unserious, but when you go slamming cities for being dopey, your own dopeyness will tend to get paraded around a bit.)

By looking only at two dimensions of municipal intellect - high school diploma attainment and dropout rates - the “study” allows significant, uncorrected statistical noise to drown out any meaningful insights they might’ve been stumbling toward.

In the case of Glen Cove, our population is both older than the NYS average and significantly more foreign born (32% vs. 22% statewide). Both age (once you look beyond 25, which the study does) and foreign born share of population are inversely correlated with high school diploma attainment, though primarily due to cultural and generational distinctions that most would agree do not correlate with lower intelligence (most who don’t work at RoadSnacks would anyway). Foreign-born students also suffer much higher dropout rates (http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coj.asp), also likely owing largely to cultural, language, and other assimilation factors quite unrelated to intelligence.

So anywhere you have an older, more foreign-born population, you can expect to see a worse score using this methodology, but clearly not for the reasons speculated by RoadSnacks’ senior fellows.

Photo By DanTD - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0