As a New Yorker I think I’m obliged to pass on the occasional Jersey joke (most recently, this one, which annoyingly continues to attract spam comments). I’ll let the above title be my comment on this entry from Tyler Cowen entitled, “Which Americans are ‘best off’?”:
If you consult human development indices the answer is Asians living in New Jersey. The standard is:
The index factors in life expectancy at birth, educational degree attainment among adults 25-years or older, school enrollment for people at least three years old and median annual gross personal earnings.
More generally, these sorts of rankings and ndexes seem to be cheap ways of grabbing headlines. This has always irritated me but really maybe I should go with the flow and invent a few of these indexes myself.
I'd be interested in reading your views on best practice in deriving such indices.
Don't tell Nate how you feel about these kinds of rankings.
http://nymag.com/realestate/neighborhoods/2010/65…
As an ex-Pittsburgher, I'd like to point out that Pittsburgh (almost) always came out on top of "most livable" US cities. For example, here's an article from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette citing several such studies, including one from The Economist of all sources:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09161/976252-53.st…
Mainly because it was inexpensive, the roads were relatively unclogged, it had major sports teams, good medical care, a symphony orchestra. Did I mention that it was inexpensive?
What they didn't measure was whether there was a good bookstore, a good restaurant, whether you could buy cilantro at the grocery store, whether the orchestra played anything other than Beethoven and Mozart, or whether any band or other cultural activity you care about would ever visit.
As a current Pittsburgher, I'd like to point out that there are now good restaurants, and multiple grocery stores where you can buy cilantro. But the bookstore situation is indeed dire.
I agree that these indices are ridiculous. I will use my own city as an example.
I live in New York City. While the city doesn't have the petty (and serious) crime problem it had twenty-five years ago, surveys have found that half of a typical New Yorker's income goes to rent. Since taxes here are higher than elsewhere, that means if you live here you can easily see your salary disappear into rent and taxes, leaving very little disposable income. I've calculated that I probably break even on my full time job, once the cost of getting to and from work and maintaining a presentable appearance is thrown in, and my disposable income effectively comes from my part-time work.
However, because it is New York City, there are very few jobs in my particular field outside of New York. That there is always something to do on the weekends is a side benefit. Really, I would rather live elsewhere (and in most "elsewheres" I could live better on a lower salary), but I would effectively have to leave my field and hope to be hired by some random employer who doesn't know me.
So you have a "bad" with New York (way too expensive for what you get) that might be captured in these surveys, with a "good" (some unique stuff that you can't get in smaller cities, including particular career fields)that doesn't appear. The surveys might have alot of recreational stuff, that you can't really enjoy because the city is getting too crowded. Its hard to weight those.
Really, people have to live where they can find work, and usually can't stray too far from their families and friends networks. I think geographic mobility for Americans, like social mobility, tends to get overestimated.
I would suggest two surveys, one that assumes that people are stuck where they are for various reasons, and compares what they have to put up with, ie costs, environmental pollution, cost of living, likelihood of unemployment. A second would look at where people would like to visit, and would look at things like attractions and weather. There is some truth to the "nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here" cliches.
I've found in practice that peoples' views of places they don't actually live in tends to come from old movies and TV shows and is usually about 15-20 years out of date, so these surveys might have some use in correcting the really bad misconceptions.