In fact, when Leonard Nevarez, a sociology professor at Vassar College in miserable old Poughkeepsie, initially saw the Forbes Most Miserable Cities list, his first thought was that Poughkeepsie’s unfavorable ranking had to do with misconstrued data on commuting. “I read it as, ‘Oh this is a function of average commute time,’” said Nevarez. But there’s a much bigger picture to consider. “My personal take is that it’s maybe a little unfair, because that’s clearly influenced by how many people take the train… I don’t take the train, so I can’t personally speak to how miserable it is, but having lived in LA where I drove for significant amounts of time, I know it’s a different type of commute, perhaps not as strenuous.”
Nevarez has spent time studying “best/worst place to live” literature in a sociological context, and is familiar with what these lists aspire and sometimes fail to accomplish, as well as the data “cherry-picking” that can affect results. He sees the value in best/worst city lists, but also stressed that it’s important, as readers, to maintain a healthy skepticism of broad, facile rankings like Forbes’ Best Cities for Raising a Family and Most Miserable Cities lists.
“These titles—happiest place, or best place to raise a family or most miserable—they’re not really scientific. They don’t withhold scrutiny too much,” he said. He explained that as journalism erodes in the new age of the “listicle,” major publications are often on the lookout for content like best/worst cities lists, which are fast and easy to produce. “They can be done now from your computer on an Excel spreadsheet. Then you can—on the basis of what is still an objective if not totally valid ranking of particular indicators— then you can just go to town in how you choose to write and interpret this data,” he said.
In Poughkeepsie, officials and locals alike had a major gripe about the interpretation and presentation of data on the Most Miserable Cities list: the area that Forbes called “Poughkeepsie” isn’t really Poughkeepsie at all. The geographic region Forbes defines as Poughkeepsie is in fact a patchy mélange of disparate districts. To generate the list, Badenhausen et al use statistics collected for government-defined “metro statistical areas.” Basically, that means that the broader region technically referred to as the Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown Metropolitan Statistical Area was simply called Poughkeepsie for the purposes of Badenhausen’s article.
John Davis, a local news and features reporter at the Poughkeepsie Journal, wrote a response piece to the Forbes list—“Residents Outraged by ‘Most Miserable’ Rating.” He said that the residents he interviewed were unhappy with the way the data appears lumped together for a sprawling area. “The identification they were using was really broad,” Davis explained. “Newburgh is a lot worse off than Poughkeepsie in almost every standard of living, and Middletown is a different city too…to classify that whole area as Poughkeepsie is really absurd.” As for the point of his own response article in the Poughkeepsie Journal, Davis said, “I think the whole point was to show how ridiculous that is…it was kind of a light-hearted thing to me. It wasn’t anything serious. It was just this magazine making these very subjective judgments, and the criteria were so overly broad that it really does seem unfair to Poughkeepsie.”
So, at the end of the day, how credible is a misery index methodology like Forbes’? Is it possible to quantify the misery of a geographic region? What’s the point of putting together a Most Miserable Cities list in the first place?
Nevarez has weighed some of these questions in his own research. He said that from the perspective of the magazine these lists are great. In addition to being easy to produce, there’s a clear public interest in best/worst city lists. Stories like these are compulsively shareable; when your city is ranked as one of the happiest in America, or one of the best places to raise a family, you’re going to want to post it on your Facebook wall. Likewise, Forbes’ Most Miserable Cities list garnered a relatively large amount of attention on social media platforms, with over 2,700 retweets and 21,100 Facebook shares.
Best/worst city lists can also reflect revealingly on a growing phenomenon of “consuming places.” Like travel channels or regional magazines, Nevarez says that best/worst city lists imply a society with new levels of choice in where to live and travel. “I find it fascinating that people are just consuming all these lists,” said Nevarez. “Everyone is consuming places, trying them on in their imagination… people used to have less choice in the kinds of places they live in and places they visited; people picked from a smaller array of choices.”
