Rob, your suggestion about livability and public services is very
interesting. I would like to see it integrated with the contradiction
that many of the major cities would love to be able to exclude the poor
from them altogether -- except that they need people to do the menial
chores.
On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 12:15:07AM +1100, Rob Schaap wrote:
> G'day all,
>
> I see the best-cities-to-live-in poll for the year is out. If memory serves,
> Vancouver came top and the likes of Vienna, Geneva and Sydney were runners up
> (my favourites, Melbourne and Amsterdam did well, too - and if these gits had
> bothered to visit Hobart' Oz would have had the winner, too). Anyway, the
> reason I bring this up is because the salient virtue of these places (against
> traditional faves like London and Paris) are apparently the quality of *public
> services* and the capacity of leading candidates to resist the inhuman pace of
> life of our age. I'm not suggesting such poncy convocations constitute an
> unimpeachable source (although the bottom-of-the-listers, Brazzaville and
> Baghdad, are not destinations of mine right now, either), but I do suggest
> there's a job for an idle economist out there in the collection of the sort of
> data economists don't count (you could add suicide rates, all those focus
> group reports on quality-of-life priorities, Australian state election exit
> polls, intra-city and inter-state migration trends, letters-to-the-editor, and
> a whole lot of the sort of stuff you often find buried in little columns on
> page 6 of the Sunday papers). My suspicion is that, taken together, such a
> project would produce a monumental wall of evidence against privatisation in
> particular and the existence of homo economicus in general.
>
> Does anyone do this sort of thing?
>
> Cheers,
> Rob.
>
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
