{"id":1488,"date":"2014-09-01T19:18:15","date_gmt":"2014-09-02T02:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/?p=1488"},"modified":"2014-09-01T19:18:15","modified_gmt":"2014-09-02T02:18:15","slug":"how-should-we-rank-the-employment-prospects-of-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/09\/how-should-we-rank-the-employment-prospects-of-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"How should we rank the employment prospects of cities?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Let's<\/a>News sites on the web demand a stream of content, and a sure way to produce something<\/em> is to make a list. My previous post<\/a> knocked a recent list of \u00a0‘top cities for culture’, on the grounds that the way the index was constructed made no sense.<\/p>\n

Another day, another list, this one from Atlantic’s CityLab: ‘The best job markets for young college grads now<\/a>‘. Relevant to me, as I teach students in arts administration and hope to understand as best I can what is happening in the labor market. The piece has some of the usual problems of all indices created from thin air, such as choosing five inputs into the index with no systematic way to determine the weights each factor should have. Although all these rankings and indices we see in our news feed come from real data, the weights are a fiction<\/a>, and completely discredit any claims to objectivity.<\/p>\n

The second problem is the factors that make up the index itself. In this case, what are supposed to be the key factors for college grads seeking a good job?<\/p>\n

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The rankings are based on five key factors:<\/p>\n