The stark effects identified here might be even stronger if I had better data on places lived throughout childhood, since many people grow up in different counties than the one where they were born.
The success of college towns and big cities is striking when you just look at the data. But I also delved more deeply to undertake a more sophisticated empirical analysis.
Doing so showed that there was another variable that was a strong predictor of a person’s securing an entry in Wikipedia: the proportion of immigrants in your county of birth. The greater the percentage of foreign-born residents in an area, the higher the proportion of children born there who go on to notable success. (Take that, Donald Trump!) If two places have similar urban and college populations, the one with more immigrants will produce more prominent Americans. What explains this?
A lot of it seems to be directly attributable to the children of immigrants. I did an exhaustive search of the biographies of the hundred most famous white baby boomers, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Pantheon project, which is also working with Wikipedia data. Most of these were entertainers. At least thirteen had foreign-born mothers, including Oliver Stone, Sandra Bullock, and Julianne Moore. This rate is more than three times higher than the national average during this period. (Many had fathers who were immigrants, including Steve Jobs and John Belushi, but this data was more difficult to compare to national averages, since information on fathers is not always included on birth certificates.)
What about variables that don’t impact success? One that I found more than a little surprising was how much money a state spends on education. In states with similar percentages of its residents living in urban areas, education spending did not correlate with rates of producing notable writers, artists, or business leaders.
It is interesting to compare my Wikipedia study to one of Chetty’s team’s studies discussed earlier. Recall that Chetty’s team was trying to figure out what areas are good at allowing people to reach the upper middle class. My study was trying to figure out what areas are good at allowing people to reach fame. The results are strikingly different.
Spending a lot on education helps kids reach the upper middle class. It does little to help them become a notable writer, artist, or business leader. Many of these huge successes hated school. Some dropped out.
New York City, Chetty’s team found, is not a particularly good place to raise a child if you want to ensure he reaches the upper middle class. It is a great place, my study found, if you want to give him a chance at fame.
When you look at the factors that drive success, the large variation between counties begins to make sense. Many counties combine all the main ingredients for success. Return, again, to Boston. With numerous universities, it is stewing in innovative ideas. It is an urban area with many extremely accomplished people offering youngsters examples of how to make it. And it draws plenty of immigrants, whose children are driven to apply these lessons.
What if an area has none of these qualities? Is it destined to produce fewer superstars? Not necessarily. There is another path: extreme specialization. Roseau County, Minnesota, a small rural county with few foreigners and no major universities, is a good example. Roughly 1 in 740 people born here made it into Wikipedia. Their secret? All nine were professional hockey players, no doubt helped by the county’s world-class youth and high school hockey programs.
So is the point here—assuming you’re not so interested in raising a hockey star—to move to Boston or Tuskegee if you want to give your future children the utmost advantage? It can’t hurt. But there are larger lessons here. Usually, economists and sociologists focus on how to avoid bad outcomes, such as poverty and crime. Yet the goal of a great society is not only to leave fewer people behind; it is to help as many people as possible to really stand out. Perhaps this effort to zoom in on the places where hundreds of thousands of the most famous Americans were born can give us some initial strategies: encouraging immigration, subsidizing universities, and supporting the arts, among them.
Usually, I study the United States. So when I think of zooming in by geography, I think of zooming in on our cities and towns—of looking at places like Macon County, Alabama, and Roseau County, Minnesota. But another huge—and still growing—advantage of data from the internet is that it is easy to collect data from around the world. We can then see how countries differ. And data scientists get an opportunity to tiptoe into anthropology.
One somewhat random topic I recently explored: how does pregnancy play out in different countries around the world? I examined Google searches by pregnant women. The first thing I found was a striking similarity in the physical symptoms about which women complain.
I tested how often various symptoms were searched in combination with the word “pregnant.” For example, how often is “pregnant” searched in conjunction with “nausea,” “back pain,” or “constipation”? Canada’s symptoms were very close to those in the United States. Symptoms in countries like Britain, Australia, and India were all roughly similar, too.
Pregnant women around the world apparently also crave the same things. In the United States, the top Google search in this category is “craving ice during pregnancy.” The next four are salt, sweets, fruit, and spicy food. In Australia, those cravings don’t differ all that much: the list features salt, sweets, chocolate, ice, and fruit. What about India? A similar story: spicy food, sweets, chocolate, salt, and ice cream. In fact, the top five are very similar in all of the countries I looked at.
Preliminary evidence suggests that no part of the world has stumbled upon a diet or environment that drastically changes the physical experience of pregnancy.
But the thoughts that surround pregnancy most definitely do differ.
Start with questions about what pregnant women can safely do. The top questions in the United States: can pregnant women “eat shrimp,” “drink wine,” “drink coffee,” or “take Tylenol”?
When it comes to such concerns, other countries don’t have much in common with the United States or one another. Whether pregnant women can “drink wine” is not among the top ten questions in Canada, Australia, or Britain. Australia’s concerns are mostly related to eating dairy products while pregnant, particularly cream cheese. In Nigeria, where 30 percent of the population uses the internet, the top question is whether pregnant women can drink cold water.