Quote:
Originally Posted by TakeFive
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You know your "study" has solid methodology when the results are almost perfectly sorted by population, population density, and have a easily readable bias for local politics.
As always, these clickbait-y things are crafted to appeal to a target demographic that will readily share it and are made to appear to be completely data-driven. But if you look closer, the methodology is questionable, the data is really questionable, and they don't have a data scientist on the study (probably because no one would sign off on it)
For example they used "perception of safety" numbers from numbeo.com, which gets its data from... feelings? who knows?
They also have share of homeless population as a factor in safety and not economy, which means that they already have a built-in bias of "homeless == crime" despite already having violent crime and property crime weighted heavily in safety.
They use school data from greatschools.org, probably because they never wanted to publish this study in a respectable journal and gaining access to less biased data sources on school performance is expensive and time consuming.
Infrastructure uses their own walk scores based on block length and intersection density (?) instead of using the NWI data or even Walkscore (but they mention them in the sources? Maybe they looked at the NWI data and decided that it would probably make places like DC and SF too positive)
And even worse "infrastructure" weights water quality and air pollution way lower than a "recreation" score (that is based on another wallethub study, no less) Recreation seems to have a higher weight in the scores than pollution, transit, and biking combined!
The best part is that a lot of these statistics indicate very little about the abilities or value of the local government. So much is based on the structure and infrastructure of cities that are governed by history or geography and not reflective of the current management. And the scores are built in such a way that helps smaller less-populated towns and hurts large population centers. Do you know why Casper WY has the lowest long-standing debt per capita? Have you been to Casper? They aren't exactly building new airports or convention centers or transit systems.
You might ask yourself "why would the scores be so weirdly weighted?" And the answer is, so they could make sure that places like Lincoln and Las Cruces are higher in the rankings than scary "liberal" places like LA or San Francisco or Denver. They got some numbers and adjusted them until they came out with results that confirmed that cities that met certain criteria were weighted up or down.
That's the long and short of this. They're interesting to dissect and analyze, but ultimately mean nothing - the bad part though is that people cite these as legit reasoning for moving to or doing business with a city, or use them as cudgels in elections or council meetings to push agendas. Guaranteed someone looked at this and thought "I am tired of the homeless and scared of crime and it is obvious that the problem is related to the city having so much debt."
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One day, when Denver builds a new tallest, we should order a similar cake to celebrate.
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