[justin66]

> it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale

I think very old, classic measures like economic activity, the number of great works of art that come out of a place, the influence of a city on its surrounding region and its world, and the progress toward better public health and safety measures (highly relevant here) are a lot more quantifiable than one might at first believe.

[umanwizard]

Yeah, NYC is better than Tucson on all those metrics. Tucson is better on metrics like "I subjectively think the landscape looks nice", and "I like the sort of people who live there". What's your point?

[justin66]

I was engaging with the grandparent post about "the best America's got," which is an interesting topic generally, but also specifically in terms of public health. And then I corrected your statement it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale by naming a number of very reasonable - and I think, important rather than silly - objective scales by which a city can be measured.

I mean, if you don't think a city's economic output is an important objective measure, congratulations on never having lived in an area with a serious economic contraction (or read about one, apparently). If you don't think a city's rate of cholera cases (to use a classic example) or, more to the point, COVID 19 cases, is important, I don't even...

(I wouldn't want to live in NYC either, but I think that's uninteresting and not what any of this is about.)