boingboing mentions the recently published cost of living ranking by mercer and loosly compares it w. their yearly quality of living listing. since bern appears on the latter (on a very respectable 9. rank) but not on the former i had to compare the 2 lists a little further. to my surprise bern does not appear among the top 50 most expensive cities and therefore, in a virtual list comparing quality of living with affordable cost of living, bern would make it to the top 3 cities of the world, best in europe. in fact only vancouver (3.) and auckland (5.) are ranked higher in that respect, both of them not appearing in the cost of living top 50 either.
oops, why did i just say that? let’s keep this a secret, shall we?
the most crap place comparing the two lists would be moscow, by a landslide. moscow is number one on the cost of living ranking, yet does not make the top 50 of the quality of living list.
bern was once 2nd in the quality of living ranking! what happened? international companies were opening offices in bern and one year later bern was out of the top 50 because the international school was more than full and so on….