121–130 of 300 posts
With its colourful graphs and precise numbers, this all sounds very scientific. In reality, I'm guessing a group of people listed where they think is lovely to live and that's what we're now discussing.
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Paris and Rome are indeed lovely. But they're just like NYC and Seattle... Mini malls and intersections.
Haven't been to Seattle so can't comment in earnest, but from that I've seen on pictures and Street View, the downtown is just your typical American large city downtown (once you've seen Manhattan, you've seen them all, they were mostly built in the same culture, architecture era and following the same urban patterns). It's essentially efficiency-driven and business-driven uglyness (or nondescriptness) that permiated…
> Other cities affected by the contagion of war, such as Budapest and Warsaw, saw their stability scores slip as geopolitical tensions increased. Meanwhile, kids in American schools are getting shot at, but yeah, Warsaw is definitely less livable than any large US city.
Mass shootings are rare but yeah, the only way you could tell that Warsaw is anywhere near a war is because of a large number of Ukrainians and all lower cost rentals gone from the market.
However, the background threat of it and cultural acceptance of guns over there would be intolerable for me (from a liveability perspective).
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That doesn't make the criticism invalid - even if the deaths are weighted by population, choosing the median is far more likely to give a non-zero value for larger countries.
Please explain. I really cant see how that might be the case.
Note that this is true even though each mini-US continues to have the same per-capita shooting death rate.
But that's absurd, since each of those mini-US countries has the same problem as the whole US. Picking the median has just hidden the data. I suggested 4 alternative ways to express this.
what is living well? Why are these lists always so skewed toward such a normative view of liveability? Zürich is a beautiful and well-organized city, for example, but every single time I've been there I've found out that its quiet translates into a boringness I've seldom experienced anywhere else. For me, a man in his late thirties who has no plans to have kids and form a normative family, it's a living nightmare.
You should be able to have fun anywhere. But seriously, should they be skewed more single 30s guys with no commitments? Should they be skewed towards the things that benefit the majority of people who are not single 30s guys. Saying this as a former 'single guy in his 30s' myself.
The Patek Philippe-wearing jet set, towards whom most of the advertising on The Economist is aimed at, is going to have very different ideas of livability.
First of all, I'm not sure who this index is supposed to help. The EIU puts a new version out every year, but keeps pretty much all of it paywalled - I can't imagine who would be willing to pay a few hundred euros to find out that Western Europe is a nice place to live in. Secondly, it's funny to see how variable the scores are from one year to the next - with rare exceptions (e.g. Kiev right now) cities don't really…
This week is funny, seems to be D week. Because through some coincidence the cities asking for a quotation are Dhaka, Denver, Dublin and Douala. On your third international project you learned the hard way that scaling compensation for the team on site by cost of living might work fine in Zurich, but not for a cheap country permanently skirting the threshold to civil war. The company started by that on-site team after resigning mid-deployment likely has the same "D" quotation inquiries this week.
That's would be an example of the target audience EIU is selling the index to. Not a pat on the back for the nicest place, but a meaningfully closer to objective estimate of how much will our employees hate us if we deploy them there. Easily worth a few hundred dollars.
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Apart from tiny tourist part of Las Vegas, are they really that different? I've walked around Las Vegas to see how the real city (not the tourist part) looks like, and it was just an endless grid of streets with condos, houses and mini-malls at intersections. Is Seattle different?
Yes, just like Las Vegas and NYC, Seattle is just mini malls and intersections. (Ok I couldn't help myself from sarcasm there.)
To the European eye, all parts of all American cities look exactly the same, with the exception of those bits that directly touch a body of water.
As I wrote last year, these liveability index ignores all the best cities in Europe and I suppose in most countries by focusing on the largest cities. I enjoyed living in the US, France, Denmark and Germany, I can't find Boulder, Besançon, Nantes, Helsingor, Münster, etc. These are all smaller cities outside of the big ones and they would all have a score higher than Vienna in this index. I am 100% confident that you…
These lists also often ignore the weather, which makes a huge difference to what most people consider to be "livable". Nordic European winters are horrible, and no amount of amenities can compensate.
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Please explain. I really cant see how that might be the case.
Consider cutting the US into pieces whilst maintaining the overall mass-shooting rate. As it decreases in size the average time-between-mass-shootings will increase. As you continue to decrease the size, that time will increase above a year and you'll start getting zero mass-shooting deaths per year. Continue decreasing the size futher and you'll get >3 years with zero mass shootings, at which point these microcosms…
Measuring smaller regions can lead to an increase of the median.
For example Norway only had one mass shooting in the past 10 years, while there have been 25 major mass shootings in the US in the same time span, in 2022 alone there have been 22 mass shootings in USA[1], but only 3 in the entire Europe - 746 million people -, including one in Russia and one in Ukraine, and only 1 (one) in EU[2] (so basically in US it's 22x more likely for a mass shooting to happen compared to Ukraine, Russia and the whole EU, at least in 2022, until now)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2022_mass_shootings_i...
But, being Norway so small (there are 5 million people there) if we count the median for Norway only it goes up to 1.888 deaths/million over the 10 years, even though it's been a single event, perpetrated basically by a nazi terrorist, it's not a systemic problem like in the US, where normal regular people buy a shotgun and start shooting at everybody, including kids at school.
Remember: we are counting incidents that kill people, so having consecutive years without mass shootings it's something all developed countries should try to achieve, it's not just stats and numbers, it's people lives!
In my country that counts 60 million residents (and over 9 million guns), there have been only 3 (three) public mass shootings since 1982! one of which perpetrated by the clan Casalesi (a mob family) in a conflict between Camorra and African criminal gangs, another was the attack on the Great Synagogue of Rome perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists and only one by a private citizen, with mental health issues.
Spot the differences with US.