The most livable cities | Hacker News Reader

The most livable cities

economist.com

135 pointskrigath287 comments

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 can find in your country a lot of incredibly nice cities to live in.

This article should be titled "The most livable big cities".

I was going to share the same observation. Also I am impressed someone mention Besançon on HN. I live nearby ! In Vesoul which is also a really good place to live ! And I say it after living all around Europe and asia.

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.

Europe in general is quite gloomy

Europe is a big place; fjords have little to share with Algarve or Greek isles as far as climate goes.

Everything north of the alps is pretty gloomy, especially compared to North America

Does Southern France has a climate close to the Bay Area? If the climate is relatively close, why is the region (between Nice and Montpelier) not a top place for technology? In Zug, Switzerland - not that far - there is a hub for blockchain but it looks like a financial paradise more than a full-time living place.

Sophia Antipolis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Antipolis) is definitely an attempt to build a Silicon Valley in Europe but why did it not work? It was pushed and funded extensively by the government, it doesn't feel natural after all. In the Bay Area, the government was there too, no delusion but private sector has shaped California for about 150 years. What always stroke me is the urban planning: the houses and roads are big and pretty even if they look old sometimes. It might be part of the Californian dream: a big job, a big car, a big home, etc. Also the administration and mentality is different, more Republican perhaps?

Southern France is south of the Alps, though.

The Mediterranean climate is very different from what you get in Central Europe, or (worse, as far as rain goes) the UK and Ireland.

"Caelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum; asperitas frigorum abest" – "The sky is obscured by constant rain and cold, but it never gets bitterly cold."

(Tacitus about Britain in 98 AD. Not much has changed.)

I personally like the weather on the southern slopes of the Alps the most. Southern Austria, South Tyrol, Slovenia. Pleasant enough to be almost-Mediterranean, but not scorching hot in the summer and still retaining four distinct seasons.

If you like such weather, places like Trieste or Ljubljana can be fairly welcoming and with low cost of living, though you need to forget about Silicon Valley levels of compensation.

Northern North America doesn't look too great... Dark and cold... Not some very lovely place to live. The south is horribly hot on other hand. Also horrible.

What do you mean by “Northern” exactly? Vancouver? New York?

North of Polar Circle to start with and maybe somewhat south from there.

For what it's worth, the place where I am at right now has been extremely warm and sunny basically all spring and summer. And that's north of the Alps.

By contrast, many large cities in North America have extreme seasonality. With meters of snow in the winter, and unbearable heat in the summer. Looking at you NYC.

Even those can't compare to the southernmost US states.

My perspective is different, but I wouldn’t call the southernmost US states very livable, their summers being incredibly hostile without technology. And climate change is making things even worse (which is also happening in the Mediterranean).

Have you been to the Pacific Northwest?

Still sunnier than most of Europe https://imgur.io/o2Xqv

One person's nordic winter is another person's Californian desert.

I can second this, I love living somewhere with deep winters and frigid temperatures, although we do also have beautiful spring and summers where I am now. I spent years in the bay and even there was pretty hot and humid, not to mention having wildfires and having my power turned off because PG-E cant update their infrastructure.

I take gray and gloomy with cold and dark winters over hot and humid summers, thank you very much.

Sure, but there are a lot of places around the world with mild weather year round.

Nordic winters are tame compared to those in places like northern north America. I live in a town that regularly dips below -40c.

But a very cold winter is nothing compared to a very hot summer. Look at how many people die in heat waves. Rarely does a cold snap result in more than a handful of deaths, and most of those will be traffic-related. Heat waves can result in hundreds dead very easily. I'll take a Canadian or Norwegian winter over a Texas summer any day.

Parts of Canada are actually about to mandate air conditioning (aka active cooling) in new buildings in recognition of the danger that summer heat can pose in Canada.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/heat-dome-retrofit-building-c...

Cold kills almost 10x more than heat

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/extreme-t...

> The study found that extreme heat and cold killed 5.08 million people on an average every year from 2000-2019. Of this, 4.6 million deaths on an average occurred annually due to extreme cold while 0.48 million deaths occurred due to extreme heat.

In India and sub-Saharan Africa. This article is about livable cities, all of which are in countries where heating is not much of an issue. Canada, a country that knows cold and hosts many of the cities on this list, looses maybe a hundred people a year to cold. But BC recently lost nearly 500 to heat in a single heat wave. In the developed world, heat is far more a problem than cold.

"In Canada, more than 80 people die each year from over-exposure to the cold."

https://www.ottawapublichealth.ca/en/public-health-topics/co...

It could just be bias in the data.

In Canada and northern US, you expect the cold and plan accordingly.

In sub-Saharan Africa, you expect the heat and plan accordingly.

It's when the conditions flip-flop (hot Canada, cold Africa) that people run into trouble.

> But a very cold winter is nothing compared to a very hot summer.

Goes right back to how subjective livability is. The above statement might be true for you. For me I'm unhappy at anything below 80F and downright miserable below 60F. Any city that gets weather below freezing is completely out, regardless of all other factors. Live is too short to spend most of it freezing. All the top 5 in this economist list are freezing places, hard nope from me to all of them.

> Nordic European winters are horrible, and no amount of amenities can compensate.

Yup... Belgium (and that's not even totally north), where I'm originally from, has 199 days of rain per year. Out of the 166 days left, half of them exhibit a gray sky. Wife and I packed our stuff, put our baby in the car and left for a better life along the Mediterranean sea side six years ago: zero regret.

Where did you end up, if you don't mind me asking?

Nordic European winters are great for startup builders though :)

The whole idea of "liveability index" is strange to me. Different people have different needs to live and different places have different cultures. This is biased towards the European and generally western style of living which although might be preferable to most people does not mean it's preferable to all.

In addition to there being probably hundreds of variables that are subconscious and/or can't be accounted for with studies.

I'm guessing The Economist has some idea of who reads their magazine and so this article is likely written with a specific audience in mind.

Agree. If you consider Vancouver as livable then you’re already targeting the 1%. The rest of us simply can’t afford to live there.

Different standards, too. I've become used to US/Canada restaurant standards for food when I go out to eat. Everytime I leave the country I'm thoroughly impressed by the quality and taste. Still, I'll be somewhere like Osaka and read reviews online. Locals will rate a place 3 stars and stay they could make it at home, it's nothing special. Place that outclass 90% of US restaurants averaging 3.5 stars, while at home there's pig slop getting rates 4.8.

Cultural differences impact what a person believes is the correct answer.

Even something as simple as "I hate hearing french" automatically disqualifies all of France and some other places.

Besançon is fantastic both in the winter and in the summer, it's a wonderful place to live in if you have a chance.

Livable means different things to diff ppl (duh). For me which city is livable is very personal thing outside of basic necessities. Münster almost bored me to death plus the church bells were super loud where I stayed. Service people were special kind of polite plastic robots, but for some people its what they want

I find it difficult to adapt. When I am abroad it always feels creepy how "servant" the service industry is. And stop trying to sell me shit.

People really underestimate how you are shaped by the society that you grow up in.

In Berlin people are relaxed and just act normal, rest of Germany it depends on the type of place a lot

In this day and age, these things ought to be published with an online app that lets you weigh different factors. A sunny, warm climate is really important for me, for instance.

https://nomadlist.com/ ?

The real challenge is finding a remote job then finding a city with good internet.

I know a few devs who have their home base in Bali.

Seems to be a nice place for remote work.

The hard part is finding companies that will hire you in wildly different time zones and figure out all the payroll headaches. Not every company wants or is able to have a bunch of 1099 contractors doing core work for the business.

Yep, and also add on social/medical/pension paperwork and permits…

Yeah, not only that but:

1. Work authorization. It would be great if the "digital nomad visa" thing really happened at some point 2. Taxes 3. COL 4+ those things you mentioned

I am not a fan of living in urban centers, whether bike friendly, walkable or not. It is generally a shitty experience, noise out of control, cost of living through the roof, crime, too many laws, tiny apartments, high home cost, worse schools, traffic and density of people, high property taxes, drunkards on the streets and annoyance of tourism.

Unpopular opinion: Classic American sub-rural living. Live in outskirts of Denver in a large cookie cutter 4 bedroom house and a Ford F-150 truck. Lots of resources, not a single thing to be annoyed by and cheap cost of living. No gentrification, people are kinder and nicer. Absolute bliss.

There are lists for the US that have Seattle and San Francisco in the top 10, but if you talk to people who have moved out of those cities, they talk about how much less livable they've gotten.

And while it's always possible that the hedonic treadmill is skewing their sense of perspective, I also suspect that these measures are somehow lagging behind reality, and that a list of top 10 is in fact the list of the best places to live 5 years ago, and the best to have moved to 8+ years ago, rather than somewhere you should be making a 2 year plan to move there.

If you are young or adventurous, you might be better off looking at a list of 10 up and coming cities instead. Though you might be slightly worse off there in the case of a recession hitting before you are fully established.

Whatever you're looking for in a city, by the time you read an article in a magazine you're too late. Everyone else that wants that quality is already on their way there (and probably going to ruin it.)

This list is a complete joke, evidenced by the fact that they use a definition of livibility that puts cities that are barely walkable in the top 10.

Whether or not a city is "walkable," is not necessarily an improvement upon livability.

In areas of Chicago and Baltimore, for example, the streets are "walkable," however the frequent violent & property crimes that take place in these areas make a casual stroll down the block an unsafe proposition.

I grew up in Harlem during the time it was emerging out of the 1980s crack epidemic. As a child, the streets were easy to walk on and crime did not impact this for me in any real way. Just a few years prior, though, this was definitely not the case. And even today, as "walkability" improvements have been made in Harlem, the streets are quite obviously less walker-friendly, since walking down the street exposes you to a non-insignificant risk of being a random psychopath's next unwitting victim.

My suspicion here is that you have some sort of binary thought process surrounding cars in cities. The fact is that cities are not as livable in general. Any solution involving more or better walking capacity is a temporary fix at best. In actuality, what you need is a very solid city planner who is able to anticipate and respond to cultural trends adequately. Cities need to be able to balance the needs of various transit options, such that they don't compound peoples' other problems that come from living in cities: crime, cleanliness, affordability, etc.

"Walkability" on things like this doesn't mean that there are sidewalks you can take a stroll down, it means that essential and desireable services (like grocery stores and restaurants) are within walking distance of most residences, and there's transit service that makes up for what lacks.

If it was just about "can you go for a walk" twisty-turny suburbs would get the highest imaginable walkability score, because you can get lost in those for hours and never see a car. Or any other useful destination, for that matter.

Most “walkability” scores either directly or indirectly account for crime. For instance, residents rate walkability and are specifically asked to consider crime and safety. Or, conversely, walkability is measured based on the number of actual walkers and the number of walk-accessible amenities in a given area.

High crime areas would naturally have fewer walkers and fewer amenities.

I can’t speak to Baltimore, but in Chicago, crime and scarcity of amenities go hand-in-hand. I can’t think of a single pedestrian-focused area that has both amenities and a significant crime problem (one must understand that Chicago crime is not nearly as prevalent or evenly dispersed as the media and non-Chicagoans enjoy imagining).

The problem in your example is crime, not walkability.

Yes, let's just pretend these things are not intrinsically linked by the hip. I suppose it's helpful to know how easy it is to run away from your assailant isn't it? In a less walkable neighborhood that attacker might be able to get more than just a few punches on you.

Walkability and crime go hand in hand. If crime is high on a street, people will not want to walk on that street. Because of this, shops will close, and any reasonable walkability score will drastically go down. You cannot have high walkability and high crime. They are intrinsically linked.

If your goal is reducing crime, increasing walkability is an excellent way of achieving that. The more walkable areas are, the more regular people will be walking in that area. The more regular people that are walking in an area, the safer it is. Walkable areas are also much easier to police and keep safe since they are naturally much more dense and less spread out, so there is vastly less surface area to cover.

Go look up the walkability score for any crime-heavy Brooklyn neighborhood [0] and you will see quite plainly that you are wrong. You are a lot more likely to be sucker-punched by a homeless psychopath on that block than you are to have any issues with walking.

Clearly, there is no linkage between walkability scores and crime.

[0] https://www.walkscore.com/score/1405-pacific-st-brooklyn-ny-...

While walkability should be a factor, less walkable cities could be better than more walkable cities due to other factors that impact the standard of living - opportunities, public transit, housing, etc.

If city has good public transport system then it also has pretty good walkability as people have to have a way to get to public transport stops/stations.

I laughed when I saw the high score awarded to Los Angeles.

These listicles always suck because by design they make huge assumptions about priorities. Including some simple weight sliders would make these way more useful, even if the methodology was a little shaky (it always is).

Agreed. A list that has Calgary tied as third best city? Sorry Calgary but.. no. Miserably cold, in the middle of nowhere, nothing to do but freeze. Something wrong with the criteria for this list.

> 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.

To be fair livable probably means the nice parts of the American city. Most American city have nice parts and bad parts, where life in the bad parts can sometimes be as bad as living in a third world. Take Chiraq for example, or even Detroit. Schools have metal detectors to prevent weapons from being brought in, even if there isn’t a risk of mass shooting.

Third world cities tend to have "nice parts" as well. Chances are they are even nicer, by some metrics.

> Mass shootings are rare

Yeah, but...

Typical (Median) Annual Death Rate per Million People from Mass Public Shootings (U.S., Canada, and Europe, 2009-2015)

    United States — 0.058
    Albania — 0
    Austria — 0
    Belgium — 0
    Czech Republic — 0
    Finland — 0
    France — 0
    Germany — 0
    Italy — 0
    Macedonia — 0
    Netherlands — 0
    Norway — 0
    Russia — 0
    Serbia — 0
    Slovakia — 0
    Switzerland — 0
    United Kingdom — 0

Using the median analysis, the United States is the only country examined that shows a propensity for mass shootings. The data itself supports this interpretation, as the United States endured mass shooting events all seven years, but the other countries all experienced mass shootings during only one or two years. Thus, in a typical year, most countries experience zero mass shooting deaths, while the US experiences at least a few.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mass-shoo...

Using the median surely goes too far the other way though, discounting the fact that the US is far larger than any of those countries except Russia. Of course the US is less likely to have shooting-free years, it's far bigger.

Other ways to display this data would be:

- group Europe into 1

- split the US into states

- display error bars

- take 95% lower bound assuming a normal distribution

https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...

> Using the median surely goes too far the other way though, discounting the fact that the US is far larger than any of those countries except Russia. Of course the US is less likely to have shooting-free years, it's far bigger.

The stats are deaths per million people.

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.

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 of the US will have a median of zero, and will be indistinguishable from the European countries in the table.

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.

It's the exact opposite.

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.

> even if the deaths are weighted by population, choosing the median is far more likely to give a non-zero value for larger countries.

the reasoning is well explained in the link I posted.

The main reason, for those who don't want to read it or went straight to comments without reading my post in full, is that

*The data itself supports this interpretation, as the United States endured mass shooting events all seven years, but the other countries all experienced mass shootings during only one or two years. Thus, in a typical year, most countries experience zero mass shooting deaths, while the US experiences at least a few.*

If that doesn't scare people enough, maybe this[1] or this[2] will.

[1] https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/number-mass-...

[2] https://yubanet.com/usa/over-70-of-mass-shootings-in-develop...

Over 70% of mass shootings in developed countries happen in the US, international analysis shows

“Mass shootings are a uniquely American problem, particularly in relation to other developed countries.”

> it's far bigger

It's also the only country in the West were regularly every year there are a few mass shootings.

That's the real problem, they have normalized it, all other countries have usually zero mass shootings for many consecutive years.

What matters is that USA can't stop them.

> Of course the US is less likely to have shooting-free years

Not bigger than

Albania + Austria + Belgium + Czech Republic + Finland + France + Germany + Italy + Macedonia + Netherlands + Norway + Serbia + Slovakia + Switzerland + United Kingdom = ~363 million people

USA = ~330 million people

---

Typical (Median) Annual Death Rate per Million People:

Team Europe (363 million people) = 0

USA (330 million people) = 0.058

p.s. read the study I linked

The thing is, individual states mostly don't have shooting free years.

The US also has a larger population then Russia.

> https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...

  phat = 1.0*pos/n

There is something disturbing about that line. While my wish to believe the article was strong, it makes me want to check the claims.

It seems a misdirection to use median across years as we have averages available. It's more precise and more readable but probably doesn't align with the policies you want to push:

    Norway — 1.888
    Serbia — 0.381
    France — 0.347
    Macedonia — 0.337
    Albania — 0.206
    Slovakia — 0.185
    Switzerland — 0.142
    Finland — 0.132
    Belgium — 0.128
    Czech Republic — 0.123
    United States — 0.089
    Austria — 0.068
    Netherlands — 0.051
    Canada — 0.032
    England — 0.027
    Germany — 0.023
    Russia — 0.012
    Italy — 0.009

Same website: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mass-shoo...

But how else would you make the US greater than zero and all the other countries zero?

Also from the same website

Many statisticians believe the reason the CRPC study's results seem so counterintuitive is that they are incorrect. One of the more detailed analyses appeared on the fact-checking website snopes.com and concluded that the CRPC report used “inappropriate statistical methods” which led to misleading results.

Brazil would have a 0.25 average. So much better than Norway! Can't argue against "more precise and more readable" data.

"A more important oversight was the report's use of average deaths per capita instead of a more stable metric. Because of the smaller populations of most European countries, individual events in those countries had statistically oversized influence and warped the results. For example, Norway’s world-leading annual rate was due to a single devastating 2011 event, in which far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik gunned down 69 people at a summer camp on the island of Utøya. Norway had zero mass shootings in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015."

On the contrary, median is a much better indication of central tendency here than mean. It is also not less "precise", both statistics are given to the same three decimal places here.

IMO I think the fact that the numbers are so low shows that people should stop giving a shit about death by guns by civilians. I wish humanity put as much focus about the obesity & diabetes crisis, car deaths, slipping in the bathtub, murder by government policy and war than they did about guns. Guns are flashy, but infinitesimal compared to the actual causes of early death.

The dirty secret of gun control policies is they do not much at all. Gun control policies that reduce actual human death are mostly about impulsive suicide prevention, and if you get rid of the guns, I'm guessing a substitution effect would start happening anyway. When you really dig into it, most non-government caused gun death comes from mental health issues, economic inequality, organized crime shootouts and suicide, and those things are not solved by making guns harder to get, beyond some suicide impulse prevention.

You are right. People care about things that most likely will never kill them while continuing to eat a diet that will very likely result in disease and an early death.

> IMO I think the fact that the numbers are so low shows that people should stop giving a shit about death by guns by civilians

They are usually zero in many developed countries and usually non zero in others(I mean one here).

So giving a shit about it actually have an impact.

It can make the difference between your kids coming home from school or not.

Gun violence in US kills.more people than soldiers at war.

Should we stop giving a shit about war too?

I think it's shows that the average US mentality is cynical about other people's lives exactly because people don't give a shit.

Obesity is a problem of quality of food, if McDonalds cost less than vegetables and poor people often can't afford healthy options of course there are going to be consequences. But the solution is not throwing money at the problem (food stamps) it's in a shift in culture, which US society is apparently not able to do, because nobody gives a shit. They are good at campaigning to deny abortion to women, but not to make healthy food available to everybody regardless of the census. Maybe it's too a socialist option for them.

> Guns are flashy, but infinitesimal compared to the actual causes of early death.

That's completely untrue. And, again, it shows the cult around guns that some people appear to be sucked in.

Guns Became the Leading Cause of Death for American Children and Teens in 2020

https://time.com/6170864/cause-of-death-children-guns/

You're right, relatively rare.

However, the background threat of it and cultural acceptance of guns over there would be intolerable for me (from a liveability perspective).

Wars kill far more people than school shootings, just not in the US and just not lately.

I don't think Poland and Hungary have a high probability of entering a war, but it is a small percentage increase multiplied by a devastating outcome.

I don't think Poland and Hungary have a high probability of entering a war

I agree it doesn't seem that likely, but keep in mind that Poland's entire eastern border is Russian or Belarussian territory, with a speck of Ukraine in the southeast. The probability is still low, but it's higher than a year ago.

Some factors rapidly changing in UK cities are

- Empty offices since the pandemic

- Disappearance of the high-street due to Amazon

- New "In-between" builds

Most British cities still have empty or skeleton-crewed office buildings. That can't be sustainable. Surely these will be sold off as housing.

Shops are vanishing at a terrifying rate. Some city centres are boarded up and only charity shops, Tesco minimarts and tattoo/nail bars remain.

Every tiny plot of land is being sold off to developers to "fill in" with profitable (but in my reckoning totally unneeded) housing. This is changing public footpaths and cycle cut-throughs and squeezing the density of some areas.

I think any metric of "livability" would be in flux and likely to change in many British cities.

> Disappearance of the high-street due to Amazon

My own anectdata, but I've made the opposite observation. At least in my hometown (~10k population), I've been pleasantly surprised at just how resilient the high-street has been. In the past year, we've had a new bakery, a new arts and craft shop, a new cafe, and the farmer's market is going from strength to strength.

While several years ago, I would order relentlessly from the likes of Amazon, I've found myself purchasing local goods in local stores far more, and am better off for it.

> I've been pleasantly surprised at just how resilient the high-street has been. In the past year, we've had a new bakery, a new arts and craft shop, a new cafe, and the farmer's market is going from strength to strength.

That's awesome. To qualify my comments, I've also seen some of that change. New shops I've noticed filling in are

- a bike repair shop

- a "slow living" craft shop

- a tailors/upholsterer

- a fishmonger (haven't had one for 20+ years around here)

But in my town (city >300k) the decline has been significant with large chains, banks, clothing and brand retail shuttering up.

I do my best to support local trade and petit commerce. The ability to use cash and just browse in spare time is a factor.

I think it’s a it of winner takes all paradigm. The good places are getting better and average places decline as business and wealth moves to the better places, driving up prices.

Banks disappearing is awesome though. They're a blight and the small branches offer usurious services almost exclusively.

Large chains being replaced by smaller establishments would be great but I don't have high hopes here.

I don't see them as a blight. I just am always rather amazed how much prime real estate bank branches take up. Yes, people need bank services now and then and often want a convenient branch to conduct business in. But I know I like doubtless many/most others, rarely use an ATM any longer much less go into a branch to interact with a human. Even the very small city nearest to me has 3 or 4 different bank branches in its tiny downtown.

A cluster of new shops isn't necessarily a sign of boom though, that's also how it looks like when landlords still haven't yet failed finding substitute renters in an ever accelerating sequence of try-and-fail. I know places where the same "newly opened!" signs in the windows keep getting reused since the aughts.

> only charity shops, Tesco minimarts and tattoo/nail bars remain

And gambling shops. I noticed a large increase in those.

I agree with your point.

But I wanted to add that with the exception of empty offices due to COVID all other problems didn't change that rapidly, IMO.

These have been slowly building up since Gideon's austerity and in almost all deprived areas in the UK, you could play the Charity/Fried Chicken/Bookies/Boarded shop drinking game for at least a decade.

>sold off to developers to "fill in" with profitable (but in my reckoning totally unneeded) housing

I have no idea what "unneeded" housing is. Are these units sitting empty?

YoY house price growth in the UK is running at around 10%. I am not aware of a glut of "unneeded" housing.

Yeah, every extra unit contributes to increasing the supply of housing and therefore decreasing the cost, which at this point has reached crisis levels.

Affordability doesn't seem to count in this list. On average housing expenses (rent or mortgage) are around 60% of income in Vancouver metro.

I won't even get into weather: the first few days of blue skies just started this week after a year of bleak gray-on-blue. Depressing is an understatement.

And health care in Canada is a joke.

Unless you have terminal cancer or close to death, good luck getting any specialist’s attention. You’ll wait for a year on a waitlist for someone to care. Doesn’t matter if you have money either, no way around it.

The system has serious issues, but I think you're being a bit too harsh. Trust me - I come from a country with a barely functioning single payer system, so my dynamic range here is pretty good.

Family doctor crisis is real, there are absurdly long wait times and people suffer as a result. But some things are also top notch. My wife just had our first son a few weeks ago and everything was really good - and parts of the process that were free would be very expensive in other places.

It’s relative. I’ve been in countries where the care is both top-notch, and you can get specialist attention and full-body checkups in a matter of days.

Which places?

Not the person you're replying to, but: Belgium. I haven't lived there for more than 20 years, but until 2000, one of their big issues were medical overconsumption. As in: there were too many doctors and specialists, and it was considered too easy to get medical attention.

But for those who needed it, it was fantastic. And the quality of care that I experienced there was on par or better with what I get in the US.

I don't think much has changed. I just went back, had a very minor medical issue, and within 2 hours after making my first call, I had see a primary care physician, who wasn't 100% sure, so she called in the specialist next door as well.

South Korea

Proper triaging and optimal utilization of resources doesn't imply you should be seen quickly. You should be treated at a pace that data shows is "good enough" given the severity and nature of symptoms.

Exactly. Specialist wait times in Canada are often exaggerated by special interest groups.

A few years ago, my family doctor noticed something concerning. I was seen by a specialist within a week, and was in the operating room a few days later. It was a potentially serious situation but not immediately life-threatening, yet I still received fast and efficient treatment.

There are longer wait times for high-demand procedures affecting 'quality of life', but that is the nature of triage.

The important part is that the whole episode cost me nothing more than a few sleepless nights, while a friend in the US who went through a similar process and spent a similar time waiting for surgery ended up with substantial medical debt.

Come to the US. Wait as long and be ready to pay a ton of money.

That's what a fair number of Canadians judging by the parking lot of the hospital in Grand Forks, ND.

I assume they don't have to deal with US health insurance and finding an in-network specialist.

I think they pay cash, which cuts a lot of cost.

Why does Canada not have private healthcare? I kind of like systems like uk or Norway where there is a free system providing the floor and a private system if you want better treatment. Both the Canadian and the U.S. system is a bit weird to me.

Broadly speaking, this is opposed in Canada by some due to the perception that the existence of a private parallel system will be weaponized to undermine the public system, as many feel has happened to the NHS in the UK.

I'd say they have a point. Brazil, where I've lived most of my life, has had its single payer public Healthcare modeled after the UK, and the private healthcare sector which is supposed to be a "complement" to the "universal" public system, is instead parallel to and competing with it. This competition probably is an erosive force.

Public Healthcare absorves the heaviest blows: expensive surgeries, cancer treatment etc are mostly or only done by the single payer public system, while private Healthcare enjoys mostly low severity cases.

> Public Healthcare absorves the heaviest blows: expensive surgeries, cancer treatment etc are mostly or only done by the single payer public system, while private Healthcare enjoys mostly low severity cases.

If there was no private system, the public system would pay for all of that. What you’ve described actually seems like it goes easier on the public system by allowing it to specialize on certain kinds of issues

Except it doesn't; the public system also handles basic stuff like vaccinations, free medicine, first response, "walk-ins" etc. It has to maintain a huge infrastructure to keep those services - Brazil is a huge and extremely diverse country.

The basics are actually the thing it does best; covid vaccination for example went well once the political stuff was handled.

> It has to maintain a huge infrastructure to keep those services

It seems like the ceiling here is the amount of investment it would put in to manage 100% of the health needs —- I don’t see how the parallel existence of a private system causes the public system to be larger than it would be if there were no private system

It does exist, it's just you completely have to pay out of pocket, and if you opt out of it as a doctor, you cannot take any public healthcare system patients either, which means your limited to a few rich people 'executive health' checkups and such. It's a complete either / or system. 'benefits' that cover the few items not covered by the public system also typically do not cover such non-public doctor visits either. Usage is so rare that most Canadians are unaware of such things.

Canada has a family doctor crisis because they barely pay them, flat out. Often a pure family doctor doesn't even hit $200k, so any med student today is going to go some specialty route. It needs to equalize with walk-in clinic rates or it will continue to not have good supply.

$200k!! (presumably Canadian Dollars, which works out at ~£126k). Here in the UK a typical GP salary is ~90k, and while we do have trouble retaining doctors that is almost entirely due to working conditions (hospitals and practices are understaffed so medical staff end up overworked). I've only very rarely heard doctors complain that they are underpaid. I can definitely see that rates ought to equalised across different medical career paths though.

I'm not really sure about other parts of the country (health care delivery is a provincial responsibility so beware any "health care in canada is X" take: they likely really mean Ontario or maybe Quebec or BC), but the part I live in (Alberta, home of #3 on this list) has a family doctor crisis that's more complicated than just yearly pay.

It's a combination of:

- A government that is outright hostile to health care workers, including fighting a battle against their unions during covid to reduce pay. The health minister famously went to a doctor's home and berated him from the driveway for tweeting something negative about him. Again, during the pandemic.

- Some specific changes to the pay schedule for doctors that makes it very difficult for them to spend more than 15 minutes with any given patient without losing out on income.

- The introduction a teledoctor system that pays better but most of the people on the other side of it don't live or work in the province.

And that's ignoring other kinds of medical workers, where they've done various things to force specialists to take on fewer patients, cut nursing headcounts to the bone, etc.

Every medical professional I've interacted with for the last few years (even before the pandemic) has seemed exhausted and on the verge of packing up and leaving.

The pay averages around $130-$140k canadian dollars. 90k GBP is about $140k CAD, which is about the same. A specialist makes around +$300k, a surgeon over $500k. Also it's about what the alternatives pay for a doctor. Becoming a specialist isn't that much more work, but pays significantly better. Also you can do equivalent work as a GP doctor working at walk in clinics / urgent care and get paid significantly more in the same city from the same healthcare system than being a traditional family doctor. It's kind of obvious why you don't have any family doctors with that kind of financial incentive system. The ones that do it do it out of inertia or really like being a family doctor for non-financial reasons.

Another special thing about the UK although is the amount of schooling needed to become one and consummate expense and risk seems significantly less. You can enter doctor school after high school and be in school for a significantly less amount of time. If you don't get in, you can move on with your life and go do something else with nothing really spent time wise or financially.

In the US/Canada, you need to get at least %75 of an undergrad, hope you get accepted into a graduate doctor school, which is extremely competitive, and then work you ass off in a very high workload situation, and then you need to do residency where your paid below minimum wage if you do an hours worked calculation, in a system designed by a doctor with a literal cocaine habit before cocaine was made illegal. Your in your 30s when you can start making proper money.

I've spent $50k out of pocket so far this year on medical expenses that weren't covered by insurance. That doesn't even include other copay expenses. Had to cash out some 401ks early. Also, 44,000 Americans die every year due to lack of access to healthcare. I would gladly wait for over a year in a heartbeat for a cheaper and more fair system.

He is comparing Canada's healthcare to other developed countries healthcare systems, not the infamously dysfunctional US one.

Ah, that makes more sense. I couldn't imagine anyone envying much about our system.

That is just not true in my experience. I have had to see specialists three or four times in the past 20 years, and the longest I have waited for an appointment is 6 weeks.

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.

Zurich is interesting since on the outside and to a lot of people it seems to be a very boring city indeed. However, in my experience, under the surface there are a lof of cool things happening in Zürich. As well, don't forget that there it has a huge airport with connections to the entire world (only 10 minutes away with S-Bahn btw) and 2 hours train-ride to world-class skiing.

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.

creativenolo: former child :)

He didn't say he was single. One can be a man in his 30s without kids and still not be single, not everyone want to have kids.

Your are right - sorry.

Indeed, I am not. I live in Berlin, by the way, and I’m not into parties and techno. Despite all its flaws Berlin has a multicultural and less white washed vibe, for example, than Frankfurt.

And talking about catering to a specific type, Frankfurt and Zürich are way more catered toward a very normative idea of family and individuals A city like Berlin by these standards is deemed less liveable, but some of its flaws is what makes it way more humanly liveable. Also, Berlin has so many areas that are completely different from one another that here you can find the millionaire tech startupper with a villa at Wannsee eating out at Hasir in Kreuzberg next to deadbeat students. That’s more my idea of psychologically livable. But yeah, if you’re into skiing, banking, and fancy wines I guess Zürich’s fine.

I think parent's point is pertinent. The ranking is reductive, but purports to be objective and all-encompassing.

Personally I also find very well organized, well functioning Western European cities quite boring. I would take Athens over Frankfurt any day - but of course the 'objective' index says I would be wrong to do so.

It’s difficult to figure out who this is really for. It’s clearly skewed towards lower income folks, who are decidedly not the people who read The Economist.

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.

A great, sophisticated city can cater to a large range of lifestyles. Whether you’re into art, sort, outdoors, movies, dining, reading, etc.

Whether you’re a teen, in your thirties, or in your eighties.

If you’re city doesn’t cater for this range, it simply isn’t a great city, but rather a playground for a particular type.

It's really weird that people publish rankings without any slider to set the viewer's preferences.

Take a step back and think “why would the economist publish such an analysis that is clearly subjective”?

The answer is the analysis gets tons of press, people get worked up over the rankings, share the link, more eyeballs, more arguments, more eyeballs —> more ad revenue.

It’s the same reason starts up do blog posts of analyses, it’s free PR.

Pretty clearly it works based on the HN discussion alone.

It's a list of liveable cities, not partyable cities ;)

Ranking Frankfurt higher than Munich is a joke. I lived in both cities (currently living near Frankfurt) and it's not even close. Infrastructure, cultural and recreational activities, architecture. None of these things are even in the same ballpark.

I've also lived in both and Munich is definitely the more expensive of the two and afaik housing affordability is a factor, too. Maybe that played a role.

I am sorry this article is terrible - it's at best a reflection of views of the Economists journalists idea of what the y consider 'liveability' - which they don't feel like sharing with us anyway.

At worst, this is an infomercial for the data components they gathered, which they use to come up with these aggregate stats.

They didn't share it because they charge a fee for the full report.

They think Istanbul is in Western Europe while Budapest is in Eastern Europe, I'm not entirely convinced that rest of their report is worth reading.

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.

I think it's more a bunch of fresh graduates who've never been to most of the cities on the list looked at some data points (and then after realising they were mostly the same as last year's data points did a few news searches to find some points of difference)

No, in reality you have to pay a few thousands bucks to read the full data report (there are links in the pdf).

It's mentioned in the text: the metric wasn't designed to declare a winner, it was designed to give organisations who need to deploy employees abroad an idea about how much compensation might be adequate for moving there. The blue ones would all fall into the "good enough" category.

The fact that there isn't a single dutch city in the top 10, but 3 in car-infested Canada tells me that I have very different standards for "livable".

I love “car-infested”. Taking public transport and living densely is my version of hell.

I think it's most people's version of hell. Even in Scandinavian countries, well-off people live in houses on a plot of land, not in apartments.

You don't need to live densely to have public transport and access to services. US city planning (and Canada for the most part) have a problem with either allowing very high density (in limited space, so you get huge towers) or single family homes, very few things in between.

I live in a mixed used era, in a 5 story appartment block, which is the high end of density around here. I have two tram lines within 400 meters and an S-Bahn station less than 100m away.

And also, dutch cities allow for bikes, if public transport isn't your thing.

See also: US suburbs in the streetcar era, which were built just densely enough that it was practical for everyone to walk to streetcar stops. You can see what's left of that period in some neighborhoods of cities like Boston and San Francisco, where row houses that were once mass-produced to appeal to the middle class have become multi-million-dollar 'luxury' homes almost entirely from the total unavailability of that kind of housing and living style elsewhere.

The equivalent mid-density construction is basically nonexistent in new construction today because of exclusionary zoning. It's only recently that some states have started forcibly re-legalizing this sort of thing by overriding local zoning codes, and it will still take decades at best for new construction to really catch up.

Cars make cities worse for everyone, whereas public transport makes cities better for everyone, even people using cars because there is less traffic.

I enjoy biking, public transport and the density to support a nice shopping/bar/party street within walking distance, but what do I know, living in the second most livable city.

I enjoy biking and hiking in the woods (not city streets), driving cars and living 20 minutes away from a major city so I can go to shops/bars/parties when I feel like it.

I also like gardening and farming, wood and metal working and generally doing all kinds of projects involving metal casting, glass blowing, pottery making etc. I would never be able to do comfortably living in a city.

The only downside to car culture is environmental concerns that I really hope electric cars fix.

> The only downside to car culture is environmental concerns that I really hope electric cars fix.

They won't fix it, because we still need to make cars.

If you get an older car that you can repair yourself and keep going long past its point of planned obsolescence, and convert it to run on a cleaner fuel like propane, then your ecological impact will be a lot less.

> The only downside to car culture is environmental concerns that I really hope electric cars fix.

How are they supposed to fix it?

In many countries we still burn gas & coal for electricty.

The cars need to be produced, which is alot more resource intensive than building better public transports, since a train transports hundreds of individuals at once, and can serve the transportation needs of thousands over the course of a day, the amount of material and energy for fabrication per-passenger is far lower. And thats's not even taking into account total service-time and cost of recycling.

The cars need parking spots when not in use, which requires space that could otherwise be used for housing/parks/recreation/businesses. Public Transport systems have far fewer downtimes (even when I dont ride the train, someone else does). Plus, they are more space efficient to begin with.

And of course cars need roads. Lots of them, and no matter how many are built, there still seem to be traffic jams.

Yes over time. Electric cars and renewable energy in a nutshell.

Even if we had infinite renewable energy, or something like Fusion Power; there are still the problems of having to manufacture all these individual vehicles, gathering the resources to do so, maintaining them, storing them, and providing them with roads.

I always wonder how driving to bars and parties works like, because you have to either not drink or have to take some kind of other means of transport, like a taxi or well... public transport.

But yes, I think your concern is more about that you wouldn't enjoy living in a city to begin with. Which is fair enough, most of these things you enjoy aren't great if you don't have a workshop and/or plenty of space (though I have to note that amount of pottery workshops in my city is quite high which is nice because it makes it more accessible to people who can't own all the equipment).

> I enjoy biking and hiking in the woods (not city streets)

That really is a problem with the city streets. In the Netherlands, bikes are considered such an essential mode of transport that they often have priority over cars.

You'd think that'd result in dutch cities being hell for drivers, but they're really not. Because you're not competing for space with all the people that can choose another mode of transport. Unlike most places in the US where everyone is forced to use a car because good alternatives are nonexistent.

You're not going to drive fast in a dutch city, but you'll also not get "stuck in traffic".

1. Use a bicycle; public transport is the (popular) backup.

2. Living in a city means living densely (for some definition of dense). If you don't like that, you should probably not live in a city in the first place.

3. Dutch cities are not really that dense in my experience.

Can I ask why?

I'm genuinely curious, as I feel the opposite

What is wrong with public transport? I understand in America it's not great, but having frequent, reliable, fast, clean & safe public transport is amazing. Public Transport in a lot of Western European countries are like that with the exception of the DeutscheBahn (DB is hell).

I just find waiting in a station, having to account for schedules, the annoyance of having to deal with bags and luggage and sitting close to people in that setting not all that enjoyable.

Well, to be fair, any good public transport comes at least every 15 minutes (and great public transport comes every 5 minutes or more often), so schedules aren't a problem if the current transport system is managed good...

Which public transport system is your assumption based on? I used many public transport systems (Mostly Europe and Asia) and usually you don't have to account for schedules if you are in a city as trains / subways / busses just arrive every few minutes.

The rare case where you have to take a lot of luggage can always be covered by taxis. In no way is that more annoying than finding parking, sitting in traffic, taking your car to maintenance etc.

Needing to account for schedules is a symptom of a bad public transit system. Good systems have buses/trains show up frequently enough that you can just go without waiting more than 10 minutes, until the point you're taking regional trips, and even then about ~30 minutes of maximum wait is normal in Germany.

Also, it sounds like you're talking about long-distance services here. But this thread is about local to regional services where people don't generally carry around baggage.

I never account for schedules for public Transport in my city, the serving frequency is short enough that I just show up at the station whenever I please. Unless there is some sort of technical or logistical problem, I almost never have to wait for more than 3-5 minutes.

In my experience americans love to talk about diversity, but hate spending time with people of a different socioeconimic class.

So something like the London tube, where millionaires sit next to people that have been unemployed for the past 2 decades sounds like hell to them.

DB is honestly pretty okay. Germans just love to complain.

The biggest problem with DB is that they're privatized (but state-owned). They've been cutting large parts of the rail network off for good and instead invest in large infrastructure projects with dubious benefits (and then DB executives retire as executies in construction companies hired for these projects).

Where I live, public transport is a breeze. Roomy, punctual, good serving frequencies, clean, constantly improving (more stations, modernizing vehicles). I don't have to concentrate on driving, I dont have to worry where to put the vehicle when its not in use, I have not been in a traffic-jam for year. And they cost less than owning a car.

>Where I live, public transport is a breeze. Roomy, punctual, good serving frequencies, clean, constantly improving

Can I ask where that is?

The problem with cars is the huge negative effect it has on city planning and neighborhoods. It is not really about cars vs public transport. It is about cities built for cars vs cities built for people. I live in the Netherlands and have lived many years in a big western style modern city (Melbourne). It is day and night.

Neighborhoods for cars:

* Noise

* Pollution

* Dangerous for all, especially children and cyclists

* Discourages simple outside exercise like walking or jogging

* Forces car ownership. You can't do anything without a car.

* Massive amounts of space are required for roadways, parking etc.

* Sprawl. Everything has to be spread out.

* Anything immediately outside your home is unpleasant.

Neighborhoods for people:

* Quiet

* Less pollution

* Safe. Children can play outside and go to the park or shops by themselves, or visit their friends by foot or bike. (I sent my 7 year old to get a couple things from the supermarket last week.)

* Biking and walking is pleasant

* You don't need to buy a car

* The neighborhood isn't full of ugly car parks.

* neighborhood is compact, making biking and walking much more viable.

* more space for public green areas

Amsterdam is #9 in the report (scoring 0.1 lower than Toronto), but not mentioned in the article for some reason.

I don't know exactly what the criteria are of being included in the list, but the Netherlands doesn't have that many large cities. Only Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague have a population of >500k. If the cutoff is at >250k, the list only grows by one city; Utrecht.

Hey don't let the secret out. Do you want all those people who read the economist and believe their lists to come over here and ruin the housing market even more?!

Paging Not Just Bikes! Code red, someone made a lost where Amsterdam is not number 1. Outrageous!

So Australian, Canadian and some European cities are the places to be. Not overly surprising (at least to me). They're the only 3 regions I'd choose to live and work due to the balanced lifestyle that the Economist rates in its study.

I'm glad Tashkent is finally in Eastern Europe

Yes, but of all the cities in Eastern Europe, it's the least livable. Even Baku is better.

How about Kabul? It's not that far away

My connecting flight to my vacation destination in Italy was canceled this morning, so I got to spend the afternoon in Vienna with my wife and kids. Strudel and einspanner at Cafe Mozart, brats from a wurst stand, the CAT train, Stephensplatz, it was all a good reminder why Vienna is such a great city.

The CAT train is a scam. It costs much more than a Railjet that takes the same time and you end up at the central station.

Melbourne is the world's most leavable city.

Honest mistake on their part. I think the exodus count is over 50,000 so far.

As someone who lives nearby and is even pretty happy with living here most of the time, let me tell you that Calgary being third on this list is comically absurd. It's an ok city in many ways, but approximately the only way it's a better city than the other two canadian cities on the list is that average income is fairly high (for now) in Alberta, and especially in oil company boardrooms in Calgary, again because of a resurgent oil boom due to the russian invasion of ukraine.

As a German: Any "livability" classification of cities that has Frankfurt in the top 10 has definitely some issues. It's a place to pass through, at best.

Haha most livable if you’re a white German speaking European

What makes you say that?

Lol. But kinda true. Some of those cities have been hostile and openly racist to Africans and hence most Africans would find cities in Africa a lot more livable compared to the racist mess around the world notably in Europe, Asia and North America.

Let's all pretend that the experience is the same for everyone, if you're not white, you know this is not necessarily true for you

It’s the same with say Portland , Oregon . Living experience varies wildly on the shade of skin you have and your cultural background. And yet I see it largely on top cities list in the US.

So Auckland dropped 33 places just because of few Covid cases ? It is true that we had a peak of Covid cases this year, but it was never really massive by international standards.

At the same time, Auckland is pretty dead for a while now, especially the CBD. Traffic is not that bad, but we haven't recovered at all from Covid. We will see in the next few months if cruise ships and tourists are back or not.

Auckland is lovely - if you can afford to live there.

NZ is not cheap indeed and Auckland is insanely expensive (managed to buy despite the crazy housing market), but nice beaches and awesome for sailing !

Yeah, I was really surprised by how nice the beaches are in Auckland when I first travelled up there.

I had thought, given how many people live around them and use them, that the beaches would be crowded, or ruined with litter, but nothing of the sort.

And the water is so much warmer than our South Island beaches.

Some of the central beaches are sometimes crowded, but many beaches are just empty. Went for a swim today and water was fresh (16 degrees) but refreshing !

Where are you based ?

Otautahi-ish

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 change that much in the short term.

A few other small observations:

1. It's absolutely comical that Frankfurt ranks 7th. I know the city quite well, it shouldn't crack the top 50 in any vaguely sane ranking.

2. It's also plainly weird that Istanbul is Western Europe but Budapest is Eastern Europe, together with Tashkent, which is comfortably to the East of all of Iran.

3. Why no breakdown for Southern Europe/the Mediterranean?

Year after year when going over these rankings I'm left with the same impression - arbitrary tastes and cultural flexing + some basic common sense observations, all masquerading as science.

Say you run a company offering the building of some novel power distribution facility, globally. Part of your offer is a team of specialists deployed at the site for the first five years, then the kinks are out and local staff has enough experience.

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.

> 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

Perhaps, although I imagine that IRL this kind of research might be bought as part of a much bigger research effort. Maybe just to have it and say that you checked some "objective" source before making a decision.

I assume someone in HR is tasked with creating a spreadsheet and making a salary adjustment recommendation. Things are probably go a lot better in their next performance review if that spreadsheet is based on several pieces of purchased research, maybe some internal discussions if the company has a local presence in a place, etc. than if they just stick a finger in the air and do some Googling. Doesn't mean their recommendations are "right" but they at least have a defensible methodology behind them.

It's all well and good saying Dublin, but just try and find a condo there for rent!

If you plan to spend 1M somewhere to expand then buying a report for $1000 seems OK if you only believe the author did some research. In particular a research better than your assistant spending 40h on it which is more than $1000.

PDF document with some more details (but still not the whole list):

https://pages.eiu.com/rs/753-RIQ-438/images/liveability-inde...

(Need to provide an e-mail address to get the above link.)

The complete list seems paid though (75 to $10,000).

[0] https://store.eiu.com/product/global-liveability-survey/

How can Calgary and Vancouver be next to Vienna and Copenhagen. That list must be rigged.

Probably because of new events or night life.

From personal experience, Vienna tops the list of places to go see the locals doing the old 1930's style stiff arm salute. If described in terms of cake, as it probably should be, Vienna is a layered sponge cake, two thick wedges of art and culture sandwiching a smaller middle layer of right-wing reactionary local politics.

It might be rendered poorly at my end, but what's the idea behind the first chart? I'm not able to make sense of it. It seems to present the same thing (city liveability index) three times, and all the cities are just thrown on there in no particular order. Honolulu is even off the charts, which indicates that there's some intention of an axis somewhere, but I can't tell what it is. Edit: Ah, it was missing a world map rendered in the background. Now it makes sense.

This list seems awful. How is Istanbul ranked this low? Almost all Chinese cities seem incredibly underrated, Beijing and Shanghai on a level with Athens, some of the top 'second tier' cities on par with Latin American cities? Dubai and Abu Dhabi as 'livable', not for the workers there, that's for sure. If you wanted to put a positive spin on it you can say the Economist knows its readership very well.

Have you ever lived in Istanbul? I've lived there for more than 20 years and I'm not surprised that it is ranked low. Terrible traffic (which makes people angry overall), huge sprawl and population, lots and lots of other problems.

Yep I have and it were some of the most fun times of my life. Every 10 million pop. city has terrible traffic and problems, including those high on that list, and all of their residents think they suck in some sense.

But unlike a lot of the high income expat enclaves the Economist chose to put up in the rankings Istanbul also has genuine culture. It's the most actually cosmopolitan city in the world as far as I'm concerned.

Anyone else notice that the text labels on the image "Vienna waits for you" aren't embedded as part of the image itself, but rather distinct divs overlaid, meaning you can highlight/copy/etc. the text.

Is this common? / any ideas on why they've done it this way? It's cool, but surely adds unnecessary complexity and require testing to ensure it displays as expected on different devices.

From the code it looks like they used this: http://ai2html.org

The FAQ on the front page provides a hint as to why this might be superior to just using an SVG or PNG.

I'm from and live in Vienna. It truly is a great city to live in. Feel free to AMA.

How's the receptivity to foreign immigrants of, um, darker complexion and that speak only English and a second European language that is not German?

Also, how are public pensions? Do people expect to go by with that 30 year from now, or do people usually have a backup plan/private insurance

In my second-hand experience, foreigners that do not speak German well are unfortunately sometimes not received friendly by government and other public staff. I don't know anybody with a darker complexion closely enough to comment on how they are treated. My suspicion is that they would feel a little like they stand out, and then depending on their German will be treated a little bit worse on average. (Sad but my best guess.)

Educated young people don't believe in pensions but usually also don't have a backup plan. People 45+ expect to receive a pension.

"The war in Ukraine is also weighing on liveability. There is no score in 2022 for Kyiv because the eiu’s correspondent had to abandon the survey when fighting broke out"

Heavily biased towards costal US / Western European cities; ignoring the changes in liveability that takes place elsewhere (Asia, Eastern Europe, mid-sized cities of the west).

List for upper middle class white folks created by upper middle class white folks .

office activity is taken as evidence of livability, rather than a consequence of a 'let it rip' pandemic response policy + antediluvian bosses who hate remote

Does anyone have access to the full list? Curious whether SF went down from 2021 and also how San Jose ranks

I'm from Vienna.

Don't believe it.

You're welcome!

Please elaborate

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/vienna-is-the-new-h...

There's nothing to elaborate. I live here.

It's nice to live in, unless you live in a district where you rather not.

Anyone claiming those don't exist is just sitting in his tiny bubble.

There should be some in-built bias, such as adding points for just being in the Northern America. Otherwise it's hard to explain how all of the diverse cities of the USA end up being clumped in one place of the scale.

That, or not having sufficient dynamic range.

Why would clustering be odd? Culture, industry and other aspects of city life spread outwards. It makes sense that if there's a given city that's very livable, that areas around it similarly benefit and prosper too. This of course assumes no segregation based policies

> how all of the diverse cities of the USA

Have you perhaps considered that they're not very diverse? NYC and SF are a bit different yeah, but other than that they're all remarkably similar. Honestly it's a significant factor in why I decided to move back to Europe. It always bothered me when Americans claim that the US states are as diverse as separate countries in e.g. Europe. No, just no. You are blinded by the fact you've grown up there and are attuned to the small regional differences. There are as large regional differences within individual European countries as there are in the US.

>There are as large regional differences within individual European countries

Have you considered that they're not very large differences and you're just blinded by the fact that you're attuned to them?

Unlikely, as foreign visitors invariably point them out uncoached.

I concur. Perhaps must notably, I found that the graffiti on the old stone apartment blocks in Cologne had a certain flair not seen on the old stone apartment blocks in Hamburg.

The difference between e.g. northern and southern Italy is large. Larger than the differences I've seen in the US. I'm from the Netherlands, so I may be suffering from the same issue, but a reason I doubt that is that in many ways Dutch culture is closer to American culture than to Italian culture, so if anything I should be able to detect nuances in US regional differences better.

> Have you considered that they're not very large differences and you're just blinded by the fact that you're attuned to them?

Well, let's compare. You could drive for days across America, and hear truly microscopic changes in accent and dialect from one side to the other.

Here in Scotland, I could drive for an hour and hear a totally different accent, two hours would get me to a totally different dialect, and with a six hour drive it's literally a completely different language.

But if you drive north from California for 15 hours you'd end up in Canada, a completely different country with slightly different road markings, Tim Hortons instead of Starbucks, and they even say "about" slightly differently! Take that you Scots!

> But if you drive north from California for 15 hours you'd end up in Canada

... and you'd still be further south than anywhere in the UK :-D

Europe hasn’t had a foreign army invade and kill off almost all of the native population for a very long time. In the US it happened just a few centuries ago. Makes for a much more homogenous culture.

OP here, yes that's the whole point, I'm attuned to the differences. There are two/three countries that I could say I'm fairly attuned to the difference, Sweden (native), the US (lived there for 6 years and we brought up on American culture) and _maybe_ China. In my experience, Sweden is more diverse in terms of dialects, architecture maybe similar, while the US has more natural diversity (obviously) and food. In terms of cultural diversity, both are quite homogeneous in the mainstream white population, and both countries have a large immigrant population, but Sweden's is more recent (30% of Swedes have a foreign background), but the US obviously have a big black population that goes way back.

On the other hand, I'm not very attuned to the differences within e.g. Norway, the UK or Spain, but based on the politics that is visible to me, there are quite stark differences in many European countries and I have no reason to believe they are less diverse than Sweden or the US.

You can debate which are more or less diverse, but you have to admit that they are on the same order of magnitude. The difference between European countries is an order of magnitude or more different that the differences within the US. I can't understand how anyone can argue otherwise.

> Have you perhaps considered that they're not very diverse?

This. Being a European, after seeing NYC, SF and Las Vegas, I passed on an opportunity to go for a week-long business trip to Seattle. Even though I had the time, I imagine Seattle being just mostly more of the same (an uniform, boring city consisting of XX century architecture built on a grid) and absolutely not worth the trip.

Americans speaking about large cultural differences between regions always surprise me - I often suspect they don't understand what "cultural differences" mean and instead talk about political differences.

This being hn, I'm struggling not to be sarcastic about how similar Seattle and Las Vegas are.

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.)

It may be European perspective, but there are dozens of absolutely gorgeous historic cities within an hour or two of flight from where I live, so flying sixteen hours to see Seattle (where I could fly two hours to see Paris or Rome) is just a sorry proposition.

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 XX century urbanism, at least in capitalist countries [1].

[1] In the Soviets, the cities were built on different premises, so they look very different - although the countries were so poor that, even though urban planning was excellent (ubiquitous parks, public spaces, houses built far away from busy roads etc.), the buildings themselves are drab due to resource constraints.

Street view as cultural analysis. Is this postmodern art?

Equating Seattle with Rome, this is just an absurd statement.

Read the thread. It is intended to be absurd.

Thanks for being helpful...

If you can't distinguish the architecture of Las Vegas style strip malls (and the culture therein) from the neighborhood oriented grids of Manhattan (and its vastly different culture), there's no way to be helpful.

I never said that. (What I said is that, after already seeing NYC, SF and Las Vegas, I didn't expect the trip to Seatle to be worth it). Next time, please read more carefully before you start posting pointless comments.

You said: "after seeing NYC, SF and Las Vegas, I passed on an opportunity to go for a week-long business trip to Seattle. Even though I had the time, I imagine Seattle being just *mostly more of the same (an uniform, boring city consisting of XX century architecture built on a grid*"

You later changed to "worth it" because you didn't want to admit that these places might not be "more of the same", because they aren't the same at all.

I suspect you also realized that if you find yourself "bored" in NYC, the problem is not the city. There are few places in the world with more things you can do 24/7 than New York.

> You later changed to "worth it"

I didn't change anything. I think it's clear that I passed on opportunity to go to Seattle because I didn't think it was worth it (why else would I pass on it)?

> I suspect you also realized that if you find yourself "bored" in NYC, the problem is not the city.

Where did I write that I was bored in NYC? I think it's great, but I also think it exhausts the experience of "large, dense American city built mostly in XX century" to the point where seeing another one doesn't add that much. Aren't Americans travelling to places like New Orleans or Nashville precisely because they're not like most ordinary American cities?

s/intersections/intersections of precisely ninety degrees/

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.

All parts of all American cities? Quite a broad brush. Maybe they should visit Boston. Or Taos. Or Santa Fe. Or Boulder. Or Santa Cruz. Or...

What the US lacks for in city/cultural diversity it makes up for with natural diversity, you should have gone! The Pacific Northwest is very beautiful.

I'm not sure I'd have much time to venture outside of the city. Plus, I live in climate that's similar to PNW (coastal Poland), and actually the desert surrounding Las Vegas and semi-desert Bay Area were much more interesting for me. I'd much rather go to Florida for example, as I've never experienced the tropics before.

I really don't think the PNW and coastal Poland is similar (if it's anything like Sweden). The PNW is like if the Alps had a huge coastline and almost no population to speak of. Check out Olympic National Park and remember that pictures are not the same as being there. It's breathtaking, pristine nature. Florida is extremely boring, the only thing it has going for it is the warm water. Hawaii on the other hand is completely amazing, paradise on Earth, but the water is a bit chilly.

> I really don't think the PNW and coastal Poland is similar (if it's anything like Sweden). The PNW is like if the Alps had a huge coastline and almost no population to speak of. Check out Olympic National Park and remember that pictures are not the same as being there. It's breathtaking, pristine nature.

Yeah, that's what I imagine. A better, more beautiful, more pristine version of what I have at home. I'd gladly see that. But places like deserts or tropics or arctic are nothing like home, and a bit like traveling to another planet - more interesting to see, although there may be not that much to see there after a first couple of days.

> Florida is extremely boring, the only thing it has going for it is the warm water.

Doesn't Florida still have some pristine swamps? It would be cool to see them. Also, I've just never been to a place with oppresive heat, aligators, plenty of mosquitos (in the swamps) and all the rest of it - it'd cool to experience it once, even if to swear it off for the rest of my life.

I'm always surprised how Americans have a radically different interpretation of diversity. This debate always comes up.

Large American cities have many minorities that tend to congregate socially and geographically, hence "Koreatown", "Little Russia" etc. You have your Cuban-Americans and eat Thai food.

An American will say this is diversity. I guess it is in a sense, but with very flawed integration. Other countries also had large influxes of immigrants in the past century and they eventually are integrated, enriching themselves and their host country in the process. I wish people would reflect more why this doesn't happen in the US.

The existence and continued renewal of historical enclaves is not an indication that America does not integrate immigrants or that America has not been enriched by their presence. (It's almost absurd to say. America is far from being "little England", and the culture I grew up with was so clearly influenced by the various peoples who settled the area, I don't even know what you could possibly mean.)

America is currently home to almost 50 million immigrants, representing about 13% of our population. This is more than any country on Earth by number, and something like 8th by percentage. This number is just immigrants, not the American children of immigrants.

The population of Chinatown in SF is around 35,000. Only 80% of that is some kind of Asian. The Chinese-American population of San Francisco is around 175,000 (out of around 850,000; total Asian-American population is around 280,000). There are areas of concentration, but you've a great chance of having a Chinese-American neighbor or two wherever you live in the city. The population of Little Italy in Manhattan is just under half white, with less than 10% being ethnically Italian. Similar demographic changes for Little Russia in SF. With the exception of some religious enclaves (e.g. Hasidic Jews), this is probably the case for most enclaves in the US older than (say) 50 years.

Enclaves existed in Europe historically and still exist today. Both in the US and in Europe, enclaves formed both naturally as a thing immigrants did to survive in their new host country and as part of government plans.

Ethnically, in the US the lines are essentially gone. Almost no one cares if your grandmother was Irish or your cousin married a Greek. (There are some pockets where people do care, but they're usually associated with historical beef—or generalized racism—and they're by far the exception.) To the extent non-white people care about ethnicity, it is probably correlated with how recently their ancestors immigrated, with recent immigrants themselves most likely to hold such views. I doubt this is that different from Europe.

We do tend to divide more along racial lines; especially between certain groups—usually with outspoken people in BOTH groups having a problem with mixing. This is seen both socially and geographically; especially in some places. (Even this has changed significantly over my lifetime in places I thought it wouldn't.) I don't really know how this compares to Europe.

I think the US is by far the most integrated and assimilated country in the world.

It has people at all stages of assimilation, including communities of completely unassimilated immigrants, but it also has large populations from just about every ethnic background in existence that consider themselves Americans first, and are also considered fully and completely American by the vast majority of other citizens. I don’t think you’ll find that to the same degree anywhere else.

Los Angeles is way more diverse, on just about any front, than San Francisco.

> Los Angeles is way more diverse, on just about any front, than San Francisco.

LA has greater concentration of a single dominant ethnic/racial group (Hispanic, 48%) than San Francisco (non-Hispanic White, 40%).

LA should really be compared to the whole Bay Area, not just SF.

I used to live on the Peninsula. I think the Bay Area as a whole is pretty bland compared to LA.

LA is also about 500 square miles to SF's 50, isn't it?

You're also comparing the biggest cities to each other. If you compared say, Lafayette, LA to Montpelier, VT to Las Cruces, NM, you might draw a different conclusion.

That bias is called "I have a car and I need to drive everywhere"

It would take away the legitimacy of the results if they introduced bias. Asia is more diverse (Sydney, Gujarat, Luang Prabang, Jakarta) and maybe the USA just isn't.

> adding points for just being in the Northern America

To the contrary, I find it odd that there isn't a single upper-tier livable city in the western 2/3rds of the US but every city in the eastern 95% of Australia is top tier. Hell, my neighbors immigrated from Australia.

Different people have different definition of livable. Even same person has different definitions in different stages of life.

And frequently people move for bigger money or career opportunities over livability.

I think Australia is very easy to have a good life in thanks to the laid-back culture and government support (healthcare, benefits etc), imo it is a mix of Europe + America.

The problem also is the laid-back culture which creates mediocrity in my opinion, the tech scene in Europe, America, Singapore is much better as a result.

Depending on priorities its a great place to live, but if you are super passionate about whatever you are doing, it may not be the best place to advance career wise.

I haven't seen what are the criteria for livability. I am not aware of the process used to apply those criteria. I am not aware of the credentials of the people/company who made the top.

So I don't care about such a top.

"... according to one magazine"

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