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¶ Good cities had slightly fewer citizens listed in Who's Who. "There are too few eminent persons in any town to affect the general score. You don't get many individuals who read Euripides in the original Greek in Kalamazoo, but you don't get many in Cambridge, either. . . ."
¶ Size of a city has nothing to do with its GG.
¶, A superior town has female doctors, female clergy (a sign of progressiveness).
¶ It contains comparatively few Negroes.
¶<L Dr. Thorndike was astounded to find fewer ministers in a good town and a slightly negative correlation between the goodness of a city and its church attendance.*
¶ A good town tends to own its water supply and electricity, a bad one to own its cemeteries.
¶ The story of the birth rate, says Dr. Thorndike, is "short but very bitter." The average number of children per family in good cities is 3.3, in poorer ones, 4.8. "Most of the rising generation is being brought up in the worst communities."
Dr. Thorndike concludes that the good town is a place where most citizens enjoy the creature comforts, take good care of their own families, live respectable, unpretentious bourgeois lives, that only 35% of a town's desirability as a place to live is accounted for by wealth and income; 55% depends on the character of the people and 10% on other factors.
Refusing to make public the GG ratings of specific cities until completion of his study, Dr. Thorndike did say suburban cities as a class ranked highest. At the top from the standpoint of per capita income were the Newtons, Boston suburbs, followed by Hartford, Conn.; Easton, Pa., and Cambridge, Mass. At the bottom in income were Augusta, Ga.; Evansville, Ind.; Kansas City, Kans.; Bay City, Mich.; Joplin, Mo.; and Camden, N. J.
Against his objective data Dr. Thorndike matched his own earlier guesses and the ratings by 280 preachers, educators, social workers and businessmen. All of them, including Dr. Thorndike, were wrong. They overvalued size, the presence of eminent men, and externals, undervalued "hick" towns.
Hens. Since everyone considers himself an expert in sizing up a town, and every Bill Smith is sure his own town is the greatest, Edward Lee Thorndike last week was well aware that at 63 he was stepping into the controversy of his life. He is used to controversy by now. The facts ferreted out by his immense curiosity have shocked people for 40 years.
When he was a youngster at Harvard, "Thorny" Thorndike began to study the instincts of chicks in his college lodgings in 1896. His landlady ousted his incubator as a fire hazard. So he moved it to the basement in the house of his teacher, a certain professor named William James. Next year the lad arrived at Columbia University to study under famed Psychologist J. McKean Cattell. Carrying two cages with the "most educated hens in the world," he sat down to rest on the steps of Seth Low Hall. A porter chased him away.