Larry Downing/Reuters
- As part of his recent book "Everybody Lies," former Google data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz analyzed 150,000 editor-approved Wikipedia entries.
- His analysis produced a county-by-county breakdown of where the most successful people in the US grew up.
- Many of the counties have several things in common, from geography to cultural diversity.
There are no guarantees that growing up in Chattahoochee County, Georgia or Pitkin County, Colorado will solidify your place in the record books, but it sure doesn't hurt.
According to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former Google data scientist who analyzed more than 150,000 editor-approved Wikipedia entries for his recent book "Everybody Lies," those two counties top the list for producing the most successful people.
Here is the full breakdown.
Andy Kiersz/Business Insider
Stephens-Davidowitz based the analysis solely on baby boomers - because they have had a lifetime to become prominent - and assumed that people listed in Wikipedia were noteworthy enough to be deemed "successful."
He omitted every entry he could for criminals and other infamous figures.
The resulting list includes a number of suburban and rural areas, which may be seem surprising. But Stephens-Davidowitz reasoned there are two big factors at play. In general, people who are successful tend to grow up in culturally diverse areas that sit near big college towns.
For example, the counties containing Madison, Wisconsin; Berkeley, California; Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Ithaca, New York were all in the top 3% of page frequency. Those towns are home to the University of Madison, Wisconsin; University of California, Berkeley; UNC Chapel Hill; and Cornell.
However, if two college towns were of the same size, the more diverse one often produced more prominent Americans, he wrote.
"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," Stephens-Davidowitz concluded of the research, "encouraging immigration, subsidizing universities, and supporting the arts, among them."