Most Livable Cities

The Economist has a unique ranking system for judging livability in the worlds cities. It is unique because it has cities at the top that you wouldn't normally think of as being very significant, with the exception of a few notable ones. These notable cities would be Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto. They claim this is because overcrowding typically has a negative impact on the livability of a city, which is why you typically find medium sized cities doing the best in the rankings. They said that medium sized cities in wealthy countries are usually the ones that dominate the list. This makes me wonder why the US doesn't even have a city in the top 20. We are a very wealthy country, yet all of our cities are relatively worse compared to other countries. I wonder why that is? My answer is that since they take in many factors, around 30 to be exact, a couple of the factors will likely be much lower in the US. One of these will probably be education, because the US education system needs a lot of work and is lagging behind far smaller countries. This is likely not the only reason the US doesn't show up higher, but I do think it is a significant one. Another factor that can sharply decrease your ranking is instability and climate change. An example of instability is in Hong Kong, where their rating will most likely significantly drop due to the protests there. An example of climate change would be in cities like New Delhi or Cairo who owe their demise to the effects of climate change. This article was very interesting, but I do have my doubts about the method they used to determine all of this.

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