My city's better than yours nyah nyah nyah I noticed today that a number of papers have published articles about the Mercer Quality of Living Survey. Depending on where each papers' city ended up, there was then a certain amount of crowing or eating crow in each article. I kind of get the idea of measuring a city based on infrastructure, or "quality of life", or maybe even some other intangible factors such as Art. But I do think all this pointless crowing or worrying about where each city ended up in the survey should be tempered with this one point - to create the survey Mercer measure "Carefully selected factors representing the criteria considered most relevant to international executives."

Let's see - what would an international executive look for in a city? Low tax rate (hello Singapore), good airport, cheap domestic help, sizable expat community, no need to learn the local language (hm, this is all Singapore).

But what does that have to do with the needs of the city's permanent inhabitants? Things like the environment, town planning, vibrant arts scene, easy access to good quality education, diverse employment opportunities, good government etc etc.

Let's face it - an "international executive" will go wherever they (or their company) think they need to go to do business. Even if someone didn't want to be transferred to Seattle (50th on the list), you can bet it wouldn't be too hard for the company to find someone else that would be prepared to go.  ¶ 4:21 PM