Comment by leto_ii | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leto_ii | Hacker News Reader

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.

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