Beyond the Averages: Why Official Ranks Miss the Mark
When we talk about Quality-of-Life (QoL), cities like Zurich, Vienna, and our own Australian capitals often rank highly. These official rankings, compiled by sources like Numbeo, the UN (HDI), and OECD, are great barometers of a city’s overall health. They measure society factors—things like public safety, traffic congestion, pollution, infrastructure, and climate.
But here is the core problem: These indexes are a collective average. They tell us what life is like for the society as a whole, but they rarely capture the full picture for the individual.
For those of us interested in Building Minimals—achieving maximum life quality with minimum debt and cost—we have to ask: Does a high-ranking city still feel high quality if half your income goes to housing?
The Building Minimals Adjustment: Individual-View QoL
Official QoL indexes often give high weight to those common, societal factors. However, the most individualistic and critical factors for day-to-day well-being are economic:
- Purchasing Power
- Cost of Living
- Housing Cost Ratio to Income
These economic elements can vary wildly between socio-economic groups, making the “average” QoL score misleading for a large portion of the population.
Our creative idea was to test this discrepancy. We created a Weight-Adjusted Quality-of-Life Index by essentially reducing the influence of common societal factors (like traffic and climate) and allowing the economic factors to dominate the ranking.
The goal? To see where a city ranks when we prioritise the individual’s wallet over the city’s infrastructure.
The Trade-Off: Society vs. The Wallet
We took data from various sources (like Numbeo) for a selection of global cities to create a comparative analysis.
The initial QoL rankings show Australian cities like Brisbane, Perth, and Melbourne sitting comfortably near the top, alongside cities like The Hague and Vienna.
When we apply our “Individual-View Adjustment,” the results show a fascinating trade-off:
- The Drop: For most Australian cities, Taipei, and Singapore, the QoL score generally reduced. This suggests that while these cities have excellent infrastructure, safety, and climate, the high cost of living and housing is a significant drag on the individual’s experience. The quality of the public system doesn’t fully offset the economic strain.
- The Rise: Interestingly, some cities like Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Doha (Qatar), and Brussels saw a minor lift or less severe drop. This may imply that in these locations, even with average societal factors, the economic environment and lower cost structure for residents provide better value, or the cost of housing is comparatively lower.
The Core Issue: Housing Affordability
The most telling comparison is directly charting the Housing Cost Ratio to Income against the base QoL Index. This clearly illustrates the stress point for our philosophy: the affordability challenge.
As seen in the chart, most Australian cities (except Sydney) performed better than international peers when strictly looking at the housing-cost-to-income ratio. Cities like Vienna, Taipei, and Singapore, despite their high QoL rank, showed a much larger housing cost ratio—a clear indicator of the massive individual financial sacrifice required to live there.
What Does This Mean for Building Minimals?
Our exercise, though not robust research, highlights a critical point: a city can be deemed ‘high quality’ by an index, yet be unaffordable and therefore unsustainable for the individual.
If the goal is genuine quality of life, we need to focus on solutions that reduce the housing cost ratio without sacrificing essential societal factors. This is the heart of the Building Minimals challenge: how can we innovate in design, regulation, and technology to decouple high quality from high cost?
The true value is found where excellent communal life meets achievable individual economics.
Make it a good day, or it is.
P.S. What is the biggest weight-adjusted drag on your quality of life? Comment below!
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