Anywhere except here

The United States had a strange year in 1865. The Civil War had just ended, but Abraham Lincoln, the man who gave it moral purpose, was dead, struck down by an assassin’s bullet. His replacement, Andrew Johnson, was sympathetic to the South, leading to bitter political conflict with Congress and his cabinet. To many, it seemed that the brutal sacrifices of the previous four years would come to nothing.

To make matters worse, demobilized Union soldiers were returning to the Northeast looking for work or trying to revive their farms. The economy was in a tailspin as federal acquisitions slowed.

Above all, there was a sense that the old America and its quality of life were dead. In the midst of this, Horace Greely wrote in a July 13, 1865 New York Tribune editorial that the American East “…is not a place to live. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting, and the morals are deplorable. Go west, young man, go west and grow with the country .”

We are currently in another strange year for the US. Our political system is in crisis, our Constitution is under pressure, and we await the day when our markets and currency collapse under the weight of debt and overvaluation.

Unfortunately, the western US has long since been crowded. Where do we go now?

“The Oyster Mine of the World”

In my early years in South Africa, I got to know a lot of “when-we” — ex-Rhodesians who had fled the country when it became Zimbabwe in 1980. In the mid-’80s, South Africa was falling apart at the seams. I remember asking him to an acquaintance where he planned to go next: Antarctica? After all, it was the next stop on the way south. The guy laughed bitterly, but he got my point: at some point, you can’t run anymore, and you just have to make the most of it.

Fortunately, as Americans, we have a lot more options than my friend from Rhodesia. If he can handle the money and eligibility issues, there are plenty of places in the world he could escape to. As Pistol told Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor … the world is your oyster.

So where does one go, if one so wishes?

The human resources consultancy Mercer has just released its annual ranking of quality of life: an assessment of political, social, economic and cultural factors, as well as medical and health considerations, schools and education, public services and transportation, recreation, consumption, housing and the natural environment. Its 23 main cities are:

1. Vienna
2. Zurich
3. Auckland
4. Munich
5. Vancouver
6. Dusseldorf
7. frankfurt
8. Geneva
9. Copenhagen
10. sydney
11. amsterdam
12. Wellington
13. Sedan
14. Bern
15. Toronto
16. melbourne
17. Ottawa
18. hamburg
19. Luxembourg
20. Stockholm
21. Brussels
22. Perth
23. Montreal

Deconstructing the quality of life

Several things jump out from the list above.

The first is that all of these cities are in countries that are, in American rhetorical terms anyway, “socialist.” Each of these countries provides high-quality public services, social security, and public health care. However, they all have stronger economies and higher standards of living than any city in the US.

The second surprising fact is that no city in the US or UK made the cut. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are doing something that their older English-speaking cousins ​​are not.

Third, despite the horror stories we hear about the eurozone and the waves of refugees flooding the continent, Europe is still a pretty nice place to live, especially if you’re in a Germanic or Nordic region.

What are we going to do with this?

There are many ways to approach it, but this list tells me that the things that American politicians tell us will make us happy and prosperous don’t really seem to matter—quite the contrary, in fact.

As long as they are well managed, taxpayer-funded public services do not turn countries into bankrupt socialist hellholes. Anyone who has visited many of those cities (like me, about half) will tell you that public transportation, postal services, internet service, sanitation, and public safety, just to pick at random, are vastly higher than anywhere in the US. We’re not even close.

Pick an oyster closer to home

People I have met who have migrated to places in Latin America that have similar public services generally report being very happy with them, even if they are not at European levels. no one who has lived in places like Uruguay or Colombia has ever complained that their principles are so offended by functional non-market public services that they would rather return to the US.

That tells me that (a) the key to quality of life is living, and (b) the problem is not how big the government is, but whether it does its job well.

As we head into an election that seems likely to turn our president into either an overbearing buffoon or an unreliable elitist, now is a good time to put aside ideology and focus on what’s important. And I can’t think of a better place to do it than our next conference in Uruguay… the “Switzerland of South America.”

After all, you could do much worse.