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Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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 :)

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/ ?

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.

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.)

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.

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

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

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