New Scientist includes Minneapolis in
a review of U.S. city "personality tests" and concludes we really are above average here.
Writer Jim Giles says cities have "ingrained characters that are stubbornly hard to change" and that they're often skewed because of population. Bigger cities have more wealth and crime than smaller ones, but a different story emerges when you factor for something called "super-linear scaling," according to researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Basically, there are several attributes such as wealth, crime and patent activity that tend to increase faster than the rate of population growth in big cities, which makes per-capita comparisons misleading, the researchers say. "When the super-linear scaling is taken into account, some supposedly exceptional cities, such as New York, are in fact quite ordinary," says Giles. "Other less-heralded places, like Minneapolis, emerge as unusually successful."
Read more at NewScientist.com.