Why New York Is Just an Average City - Issue 50: Emergence
▻http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/why-new-york-is-just-an-average-city
How rich, creative, or safe can we expect a city to be? How can we establish which cities are the most innovative, the most violent, or the most effective at generating wealth? How do they rank according to economic activity, the cost of living, the crime rate, the number of AIDS cases, or the happiness of their populations? The conventional answer is to use simple per capita measures as performance indices and rank order of cities accordingly. Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita (...)