[extropy-chat] World's most and least expensive cities

[Gregory Propf]

Amara Graps wrote:

> J. Andrew Rogers:
>
>>  11    Beijing, China
>>  12    New York City, USA
>
>
>> It's when I saw this that I started to wonder what their criteria was.
>
> [...]
>
>> Any clue why this is?  Is it being normalized for per capita income of
>> the local population? 
>

In as much as cost of living is basically housing cost, I'm guessing 
this is something like what is going on.  An "average" dwelling in a 
typical third world city might be very cheap indeed.  But its lack of 
reliable and adequate heat, A/C, hot water, noise control, fire safety, 
physical security, etc... mean that it doesn't even get counted when 
these surveys are taken.  A relatively very small number of dwellings in 
such places are up to western standards for all those things and these 
places are correspondingly fantastically expensive.  The distribution 
would have a low median and average and be strongly "right skew".  New 
York, London or similar place by contrast would have almost all 
dwellings at a high quality level and a high cost as well.  The cost of 
a "western comfort level" in New York or London might be less though 
than in a third world capital.