Johnson County, Iowa has produced the third-highest rate of notable people, according to a study of Wikipedia entries.
A New York Times contributor did the research and found people born in Boston, San Francisco, and Iowa City between 1946 and 1965 are most likely to have Wikipedia entries. The author, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, admits “there are certainly limitations” to a study like this — but there’s nothing we Iowa Citians love more than Iowa City, so I’m going to write about it.
Other college towns also dot the leaderboard, which Stephens-Davidowitz attributes to their having academic genes and exposure to nice things: “Early exposure to innovation. One of the fields where college towns are most successful in producing top dogs is music. A kid in a college town will be exposed to unique concerts, unusual radio stations and even record stores. College towns also incubate more than their expected share of notable businesspeople.”
Interestingly, spending on education didn’t appear in this study to have much to do with producing notable people: "In states with similar percentages of the population living in urban areas, education spending did not correlate with rates of producing notable writers, artists or business leaders.“
Some of the small print, from The Gazette:
One in 862 people born in Johnson County from 1946-1964 went on to become “notable,” or profiled in Wikipedia, which is the third highest rate in the nation behind Boston (in Suffolk County, Mass.) and San Francisco (San Francisco County, Calif.). … Stephens-Davidowitz matched birth counties of the 150,000 people with profiles in Wikipedia, and focused on the baby boomer generation from 1946 to 1964. Those findings were compared to birthrates by county to determine the rate people from different locations become notable. Only counties with at least 20,000 births in that time period were included in the analysis.
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