The Daily Beast is at it again. After deeming Ithaca stressful, unhappy, tech savvy, and also the best city for recent college grads, they’ve now crowned our wonderful little college town as the 14th gayest city in America:
Located in upstate New York—and home to Ithaca College and Cornell University—Ithaca is a young and smart city, ranking eighth for the median age group (27.9) and third for the number of college graduates (55 percent). What’s more, Ithaca is the least populated city among the top 20 (101,000).
Unlike the previous sets of rankings, the metric used for this one is reasonable: the “gay index” simply indicates how the number of same-sex couples in all households compares to the national average.
What’s striking, though, is the article’s claim about the benefits of tolerance:
While politicians and voters continue to debate whether LGBT people have the right to marry, to adopt children, or serve openly in the U.S. military, a growing body of research suggests that considerable benefits accrue to those cities and metro areas that have sizeable, visible concentrations of gay men and lesbians. Income levels are higher, as are many other measures of life satisfaction.
I’m all for increasing tolerance of gays and lesbians, but it’s a bit ridiculous to argue that increased tolerance leads to higher housing values, higher levels of community attachment and satisfaction, greater economic performance, and a more “affluent political culture.” They’ve got the causal link all mixed up. Isn’t it more likely that gays and lesbians are simply attracted to tolerant cities, which more often than not have the aforementioned characteristics? The authors go on to acknowledge the weakness of their causal link, but their wording still suggests some causal linkage:
As Gates and I have pointed out elsewhere, the presence of LGBT people isn’t a sufficient condition for wealth creation in and of itself; gay men and lesbians are no more sophisticated, economically productive, innovative, or entrepreneurial than any other group on average. But places that attract gay people and lesbians tend to have the same open-minded attitudes and business styles that foster innovation. A visible LGBT community is the proverbial “canary in the coal mine,” signaling openness to new ideas, new business models, and diverse and different thinking kinds of people—precisely the characteristics of a local ecosystem that can attract cutting-edge entrepreneurs and mobilize new companies.
Conclusion: Ithaca is innovative.
Damned weirdos.
Dennis, it must be a slow news week… While your first extracted paragraph does suggest a flipped cause & effect, they clearly refute it in your second excerpt. You seem to have gone “offtrack” from the original & more interesting topic, to become a teacher grading a 200 level english paper. Would have loved to hear more about how a city like Ithaca reacts/celebrates/hides from, being deemed such a gay friendly city.