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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I've traveled a lot, including to Germany. My wife lived in Zurich. Please don't assume I'm being parochial.

You and I are not the right control group for this experiment. I'm not going to move to Jackson because my favorite bands will never play there, and because I like high-end and ethnic restaurants. But a 44-year-old schoolteacher might not care about those things. The decision between Jackson and Chicago might not be cut-and-dry for him.

(Also, have you been to Jackson? I have. It's not squalid. It's not hickish. It's just a small city. It has several large colleges, and is the headquarters for a couple large companies.)

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Oh, I didn't mean that. I just meant that "how much stuff you can buy" is perhaps not the only possible measurement of quality of life. And I've long thought PPP to be almost irrelevant in developed countries. Every single thing I buy I buy on quality, not price or quantity. PPP utterly fails to account for that. It's useless.

Anyway. Cool, I like Zurich. Hm, this thread is making me remember all these cities and influencing my holiday plans!

update: you edited your post. I have never been to Jackson, nor any American city aside from NYC and the California sprawl (LA/SF/SD). Yes, your 44-yr-old schoolteacher might enjoy a happy, quiet life there. I am sure it is a fine city, but I have zero interest in ever visiting it. Again, you are right - we are not the right control group here.

Not sure I totally buy this argument. Housing, food, and transportation are three things that vary wildly in price around the world, and which you can't buy strictly on quality. For instance, whatever else you might want to say about Jackson, you can get a better house there than you can get in NYC metro.

(edits: look me up if you ever make it to Chicago, which is a cooler place to visit than LA, and also note that SF is not in the same sprawl as LA and SD. =P)

But people don't just buy houses, they buy lifestyles and locations in which they live. The actual physical house might be better but who cares?

Your average NYC dweller probably wouldn't even live in Jackson if the rent was totally free. The physical quality of the house's construction, etc, is almost totally irrelevant.

Your arguments are tending to sound more emotional than rational. NYC has a huge underclass, perhaps most of which would happily take a house in Jackson if they could get a secure job there and move without totally disrupting their lives. NYC is, for instance, a really bad place to raise a family on the national median income, or to start a company on same.

The point made upthread was that no German would consider a life in Jackson equivalent to the life they could have in Germany. That's true, but it's probably mostly true because most people in Jackson don't speak German or eat the same food. And the converse is also true; someone from Jackson would probably find Berlin cramped and invasive. That's why you have to control for cultural stuff.

(This post is now getting lots of debunking comments that I think are more sound than "it's ridiculous to even compare the two because Germans would scoff at Jackson").

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