Rank Has its Privileges

By Erik Hare

I recently came across the latest rankings for metro areas – this one was on the Best Places to Educate Children.  I was amused to note that much-maligned cites like Washington DC (#1) and St Louis (#9) and even Akron (#5) made the list.  But our little spot on the map came in at #11, and that’s what was really funny.  Not the ranking, but the fact that we were described as “Minneapolis-St Paul, MN, Bloomington, WI”.

Yup.  We were graded on quality of our education opportunities by people who failed geography.

Of course, this isn’t the only big mistake to plague rankings lately.  A high school came out #5 in the Nation, only to be told it was a math error and that they actually sucked rocks.  Whoops!  This survey was done by Standard & Poors, aka Poor Standards, the same people that have a big hand in running the stock market.

Why do we have all these rankings?  Why is Forbes, in particular, absolutely obsessed by them, as is Newsweek?  I think it’s because a bunch of people can sit in an office and create something that looks like news.  People get into this stuff because it brings out competitive urges and all the great mechanisms for reinforcing Civic Pride, thus generating boffo sales.

Think of this as the Reality TV of the magazine world; a big buzz for very little effort.

The problem with it all is that it is utterly meaningless.  I hope that people shopping for homes don’t move here because they read how the Minneapolis-Saint Paul multiple-county area beats out other parts of the world in some ranking published on the glossy pages of a magazine.  For one thing, the criteria and how they are selected are usually buried way down the article, and never echoed when the headline is picked up by other news outlets.  Another issue is the great myth that Minneapolis and Saint Paul can in fact be combined into one entity for any kind of analysis and reporting.

Lastly, no one ever has done a ranking on the only thing that I happen to think matters the most.  That key characteristic is whether or not people seem to care about the place that they live and get together to make it better without being hit with a cattle prod – one ranking where Saint Paul, and maybe Pittsburgh, would hit the top spot as far as I can tell. 

Sadly, these rankings always show up in real estate sections of various publications all the time.  Yahoo real estate is particularly fond of them for some reason.  I can’t believe that they are popular with actual real estate buyers, but they may get readers in general to tune in more often.  That’s what counts when you’re selling ads.

All this attention means that these relentless rankings do enter the way we talk about places despite being largely meaningless.  That’s a very sad thing.  I hope that REALTORS can deflect this kind of talk when they hear it, or at least channel in a way that is harmless.  Most people probably move here because they have a job, so the best use for these rankings might be to allow people to get excited about a decision that they made anyway.  There’s little harm in that.

Overall, these rankings really come down to journalism on the cheap carelessly barging its way into civic pride.  That cheapens one of the great forces that has made our nation strong and empowers people to take control of the lives around them.  To the relentless rankers, all that is nothing more than fodder for their PR machine.   Among all other journalists, I rank them #102 and dropping.