Seattle-area has 6th smartest people

Generally, I don’t like lists and rankings. Worst traffic, worst roads, best schools, best coffee – there’s a list for everything. An annual ranking of America’s smartest cities is interesting because of the methodology The Daily Beast uses to compare populated areas of the country.

Together, the cities of Seattle, Tacoma, and Bellevue are 6th on the list of America’s smartest cities. Boston is number 1, followed by: Hartford-New Haven, Connecticut; San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, California; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; and Denver, Colorado.

The Daily Beast ranking of America’s 55 largest cities by brain power, looks at cities’ statistics on both educational attainment and intellectual environment. While Boston was the most intelligent area, Las Vegas had the lowest cumulative IQ of the cities they compared.

Here’s what they say about the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area (we’ve moved up a spot from last year, btw):

Daily Beast IQ Score: 141.69

Metropolitan area population: 3,407,848

Bachelor’s degrees: 24%

Graduate degrees: 13%

Year-to-date adult nonfiction book sales: 5,154,000