We mentioned the Honest Tea experiment/publicity stunt that was running in cities across America yesterday. According to the “official” results, Chicago is the most honest city in America, since 99 percent of people there who took tea paid for it even though they may have thought that no one was monitoring. Dallas did OK, but only showed a 96 percent honesty rate.
But those raw numbers don’t tell the whole story. As Freakonomics notes, there were substantial differences in the weather of the cities involved. So I did a little number crunching and devised a new stat: TAH (temperature-adjusted honesty.) It’s a simple formula. ((Temperature in degrees Fahrenheit/100) * (Honest Tea raw honesty percentage * 100)).
And I so present the true ranking of the honesty of America’s cities:
| City | Temperature (F) | Raw Honesty | TAH | |||
| Dallas | 101 | 96% | 97% | |||
| Cincinnati | 100 | 96% | 96% | |||
| Atlanta | 96 | 96% | 91% | |||
| Philadelphia | 92 | 96% | 88% | |||
| Washington, DC | 94 | 91% | 86% | |||
| Miami | 92 | 92% | 85% | |||
| Chicago | 85 | 99% | 84% | |||
| Boston | 86 | 97% | 83% | |||
| New York | 95 | 86% | 82% | |||
| Los Angeles | 92 | 80% | 87% | |||
| San Francisco | 74 | 93% | 69% | |||
| Seattle | 67 | 97% | 65% | |||
