In fact, Chetty’s team found even more evidence that knowledge drove this kind of cheating. When Americans moved from an area where this variety of tax fraud was low to an area where it was high, they learned and adopted the trick. Through time, cheating spread from region to region throughout the United States. Like a virus, cheating on taxes is contagious.
Now stop for a moment and think about how revealing this study is. It demonstrated that, when it comes to figuring out who will cheat on their taxes, the key isn’t determining who is honest and who is dishonest. It is determining who knows how to cheat and who doesn’t.
So when someone tells you they would never cheat on their taxes, there’s a pretty good chance that they are—you guessed it—lying. Chetty’s research suggests that many would if they knew how.
If you want to cheat on your taxes (and I am not recommending this), you should live near tax professionals or live near tax cheaters who can show you the way. If you want to have kids who are world-famous, where should you live? This ability to zoom in on data and get really granular can help answer this question, too.
I was curious where the most successful Americans come from, so one day I decided to download Wikipedia. (You can do that sort of thing nowadays.)
With a little coding, I had a dataset of more than 150,000 Americans deemed by Wikipedia’s editors to be notable enough to warrant an entry. The dataset included county of birth, date of birth, occupation, and gender. I merged it with county-level birth data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics. For every county in the United States, I calculated the odds of making it into Wikipedia if you were born there.
Is being profiled in Wikipedia a meaningful marker of notable achievement? There are certainly limitations. Wikipedia’s editors skew young and male, which may bias the sample. And some types of notability are not particularly worthy. Ted Bundy, for example, rates a Wikipedia entry because he killed dozens of young women. That said, I was able to remove criminals without affecting the results much.
I limited the study to baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) because they have had nearly a full lifetime to become notable. Roughly one in 2,058 American-born baby boomers were deemed notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry. About 30 percent made it through achievements in art or entertainment, 29 percent through sports, 9 percent via politics, and 3 percent in academia or science.
The first striking fact I noticed in the data was the enormous geographic variation in the likelihood of becoming a big success, at least on Wikipedia’s terms. Your chances of achieving notability were highly dependent on where you were born.
Roughly one in 1,209 baby boomers born in California reached Wikipedia. Only one in 4,496 baby boomers born in West Virginia did. Zoom in by county and the results become more telling. Roughly one in 748 baby boomers born in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, where Boston is located, made it to Wikipedia. In some other counties, the success rate was twenty times lower.
Why do some parts of the country appear to be so much better at churning out America’s movers and shakers? I closely examined the top counties. It turns out that nearly all of them fit into one of two categories.
First, and this surprised me, many of these counties contained a sizable college town. Just about every time I saw the name of a county that I had not heard of near the top of the list, like Washtenaw, Michigan, I found out that it was dominated by a classic college town, in this case Ann Arbor. The counties graced by Madison, Wisconsin; Athens, Georgia; Columbia, Missouri; Berkeley, California; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Gainesville, Florida; Lexington, Kentucky; and Ithaca, New York, are all in the top 3 percent.
Why is this? Some of it is may well be due to the gene pool: sons and daughters of professors and graduate students tend to be smart (a trait that, in the game of big success, can be mighty useful). And, indeed, having more college graduates in an area is a strong predictor of the success of the people born there.
But there is most likely something more going on: 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 independent record stores. And this isn’t limited to the arts. College towns also incubate more than their expected share of notable businesspeople. Maybe early exposure to cutting-edge art and ideas helps them, too.
The success of college towns does not just cross regions. It crosses race. African-Americans were noticeably underrepresented on Wikipedia in nonathletic fields, especially business and science. This undoubtedly has a lot to do with discrimination. But one small county, where the 1950 population was 84 percent black, produced notable baby boomers at a rate near those of the highest counties.
Of fewer than 13,000 boomers born in Macon County, Alabama, fifteen made it to Wikipedia—or one in 852. Every single one of them is black. Fourteen of them were from the town of Tuskegee, home of Tuskegee University, a historically black college founded by Booker T. Washington. The list included judges, writers, and scientists. In fact, a black child born in Tuskegee had the same probability of becoming a notable in a field outside of sports as a white child born in some of the highest-scoring, majority-white college towns.
The second attribute most likely to make a county’s natives successful was the presence in that county of a big city. Being born in San Francisco County, Los Angeles County, or New York City all offered among the highest probabilities of making it to Wikipedia. (I grouped New York City’s five counties together because many Wikipedia entries did not specify a borough of birth.)
Urban areas tend to be well supplied with models of success. To see the value of being near successful practitioners of a craft when young, compare New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles. Among the three, New York City produces notable journalists at the highest rate; Boston produces notable scientists at the highest rate; and Los Angeles produces notable actors at the highest rate. Remember, we are talking about people who were born there, not people who moved there. And this holds true even after subtracting people with notable parents in that field.
Suburban counties, unless they contained major college towns, performed far worse than their urban counterparts. My parents, like many boomers, moved away from crowded sidewalks to tree-shaded streets—in this case from Manhattan to Bergen County, New Jersey—to raise their three children. This was potentially a mistake, at least from the perspective of having notable children. A child born in New York City is 80 percent more likely to make it into Wikipedia than a kid born in Bergen County. These are just correlations, but they do suggest that growing up near big ideas is better than growing up with a big backyard.