Forbes Tops List of Worst Lists

MITHRIDATES
Isn't it fun to rank things? Look, I like my lists as much as the next guy (on the list) and I don't ask much: only that the people making the list are not completely and irretrievably mentally deficient like the sponge-for-brains editors at Forbes.
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Portland, ME recently topped the magazine's list of Most Livable Cities. This is almost plausible. It's a nice place. I might even live there. And I can't say enough about the great state of Maine. And the New Englander in me loves to see his native land come out on top. But let's move on down the list a bit more to see — there it is at number 9 — Worcester, MA!

That's it. Throw the list in the trash. Right now. Worcester, MA — the Youngstown, OH of New England — shouldn't be in the top 50 in its own state. Not by any reasonable measure by reasonable people. Even worse now that Moses has been toppled in a fit of rage.

But let's be a bit more objective just for kicks. Here are two impossibly stupid things the Forbes folks did:

• They looked only at Metropolitan Statistical Areas with over 500,000 people. This might be a sensible thing to do. What makes it completely insensible is to then look at the metrics for tiny towns within those MSAs and apply the tiny town metric to the whole area. Not following me? Here's an example:
  
  Portland, ME has about 64,000 people living in it. They claim the Portland metro area ranks high on five key metrics and then write about the "513,000 residents living the good life in the Portland metropolitan area". OK, so we must be talking about MSAs and not tiny towns within the MSAs, right?
  
  Peabody, MA — a harmless, but mediocre tiny town just outside of Boston that by some miracle of pseudo-science is #14 on any list — is indeed in an MSA over 500,000 people. You may have heard of it. It's called BOSTON.
  
  Look, Boston has its charms, but it's way too expensive ever to make it onto one of these "livable" lists. So these imbeciles at Forbes must be looking at metrics for just the town of Peabody, in which case they're inconsistent buffoons; OR they're looking at the whole MSA, their list is dumber than I imagined, and they badly mispelled (sorry) Boston.
  


• At this point do we even need to mention that even a imbecilic chimpanzee would know that income growth over the past five years does not measure how affordable a place is compared with its cost-of-living, as Forbes suggests in commenting that "residents can afford the relatively high cost of living because of a 6.3% income growth rate over the past five years?"
  

Still think it's one big MENSA meeting over there in the Forbes editorial room? These cretins put Baltimore, MD as the #8 most livable city in the US. My God, how far we've fallen, if that's true. In the real world, Baltimore slugs it out with Green Bay and Detroit for worst places in North America. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Chicago is somehow the 3rd most miserable city in the US!

But I guess in the end it's all good. Darwin's always at work. If you believe the nonsense these fools are selling you, pack up your Chi-town bags and head for BeMore. Both cities just just raised their average IQ. But otherwise cancel your subscription and use your dollars to save some other magazine that might be worth the ink.