Over the last couple of days I've been working on developing a statistic that can summarize a lot of the shit happening in American cities today, my east coast friend calls it the "Thoro Index." What I did was give each of the 375 largest cities in the USA a score from 0 to 100 for 7 categories: 1) murders per 100,000 2) violent crimes per 100,000 3) % housing units vacant 4) % with a college degree 5) % in the labor force 6) median household income 7) poverty rate. I got this information from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Morgan Quitno crime tracking company. So the THORO INDEX was simply the average score of these 7 categories for each city. It can be read as "the percentage" thoro of a 100% thoro place. I.e. Camden, NJ is 97.27 as thoro as the highest possible thoro place in America.
The results are as follows:
1 Camden NJ 97.27
2 St. Louis MO 77.92
3 Baltimore MD 77.06
4 Detroit MI 76.41
5 Flint MI 76.19
6 Compton CA 74.87
7 New Orleans LA 74.64
8 Gary IN 74.29
9 Miami FL 73.07
10 Youngstown OH 72.39
11 Buffalo NY 71.14
12 Newark NJ 70.84
13 San Bernardino CA 70.81
14 Reading PA 69.94
15 Trenton NJ 69.94
16 Miami Beach FL 69.27
17 Hartford CT 69.17
18 Birmingham AL 69.16
19 Cleveland OH 69.04
20 Philadelphia PA 67.55
21 Richmond VA 67.39
22 Pompano Beach FL 66.52
23 Dayton OH 65.92
24 Atlanta GA 65.53
25 Macon GA 65.11
What does all of this ULTRA-NERDY shit mean? That in every way imaginable, the places on that list are STRUGGLING (call them ghetto, gangster whatever you want to call them) big time with issues of crime, education, employment and poverty.
So for you St. Louis MO folks, #2 that is extremely high. If people don't want to take people's words for it then you can just do a quantitative analysis like this. It's reasonable to conclude that only 1 place in the entire country is struggling more with the mentioned issues of crime, education, employment and poverty than you guys. Especially true when you throw East STL into the mix.
So after the 375 largest cities were down, THORO INDEX now has the form of an equation so the data for any other city can be plugged in. Out of curiosity, I plugged in a lot of other cities and the highest I found were East St. Louis (97.02) and Benton Harbor (91.22).