Rankings Are Ranked By the Ranker

In 1913, a prominent geographer named Ellsworth Huntington sent a letter to 213 scholars from 27 countries. His goal was to create "a map showing the distribution of the higher elements of civilization throughout the world." In their decisions, factors would be things like abilities to create new concepts and put them into practice, a sense of self-control, high standards of honesty and morality, power of initiative, and so on. Each contributor was given a list of 185 regions of the world with instructions of ranking them 1-10.

The interesting thing about this story was the 25 members who were American were asked to do the same thing for regions of the US, but on a scale of 1-6. To give you an idea of some of the results, Southern Alaska came back last with a score of 1.5, and Arizona and New Mexico was second to last with a score of 1.6. Massachusetts came in first with a perfect 6.0, while Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York tied for second with 5.8. Huntington went on to say that the "citadel of American civilization" was New England and New York. He published his findings in a book called "Civilization and Climate" in 1915.

You're probably wondering "why is this interesting?"

The book was published by Yale University Press, and Huntington himself was a professor of geography at Yale University, which is located in New Haven, Connecticut. Of all 25 American contributors, there are a few who received special recognition, and they were from the following states: 2 from Connecticut, 5 from New York, 1 from Rhode Island, 4 from Massachusetts, and 1 from Pennsylvania. Huntington mentions in his book that he couldn't find anyone in the US who would contribute west of Minnesota, or south of the Ohio River.

If you're catching the meaning, only people of the Northeast contributed to this undertaking, and the Northeast is who scored the highest. This is a lesson in ranking systems: typically in ranking systems, the way things rank has more to do with who's doing the ranking as opposed to the information actually being ranked. It goes back to that old saying "History is told by the victor." Statistics can be manipulated to say whatever you want them to say, but in this case, no one deliberately had a motive of naming the Northeast the best part of the US, but since all the members were from there, that's what the end result became. It would be interesting what would've happened if there would've been members from all over the US.

Bet you didn't know that!