Re: More privatisation

[Rob Schaap <bantam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

G'day all,

I see the best-cities-to-live-in poll for the year is out.  If memory serves,
Vancouver came top and the likes of Vienna, Geneva and Sydney were runners up
(my favourites, Melbourne and Amsterdam did well, too - and if these gits had
bothered to visit Hobart' Oz would have had the winner, too).  Anyway, the
reason I bring this up is because the salient virtue of these places (against
traditional faves like London and Paris) are apparently the quality of *public
services* and the capacity of leading candidates to resist the inhuman pace of
life of our age.  I'm not suggesting such poncy convocations constitute an
unimpeachable source (although the bottom-of-the-listers, Brazzaville and
Baghdad, are not destinations of mine right now, either), but I do suggest
there's a job for an idle economist out there in the collection of the sort of
data economists don't count (you could add suicide rates, all those focus
group reports on quality-of-life priorities, Australian state election exit
polls, intra-city and inter-state migration trends, letters-to-the-editor, and
a whole lot of the sort of stuff you often find buried in little columns on
page 6 of the Sunday papers).  My suspicion is that, taken together, such a
project would produce a monumental wall of evidence against privatisation in
particular and the existence of homo economicus in general.

Does anyone do this sort of thing?

Cheers,
Rob.