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Olaf Ransome's avatar

This was a fabulous piece.

Quality of life is not a single common denominator. In our recent email exchange, I mentioned the latest quality of life ratings from Monocle. They do something interesting where they evaluate particular cities out winning or losing on certain aspects and then have an overall candidate.

I think the things you mentioned here would be valuable additions to the way they think about things.I’d say it’s worth having another knock on that door that didn’t open when you knocked the first time.

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Rocco Pendola's avatar

I appreciate, Olaf. Yeah, it's interesting to see the rankings, no doubt. If anything, they should help inform public policy and such in other places. But the lists are treated as calls to move. And that's not a good purpose for them to serve to any extent that they're serving it.

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Olaf Ransome's avatar

I have always thought of rankings as doing two things: a) driving you to keep doing things which get valued and b) signalling to others what the world at large feels is a good benchmark

I feel Monocle need to add an evaluation of “thriving local neighbourhood”

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