My Most Appropriate City?

Featured

by Dan Nexon

19 June 2005, 0159 EDT

Like Scott, I found my results in the “Which American Cities Best Fit You?” survey a little surpring:

American Cities That Best Fit You:

80% Chicago

75% Philadelphia

70% New York City

65% Boston

45% Atlanta

My real list is NYC; Boston; San Francisco; Washington, DC; Chicago; and Minneapolis.

I suppose part of the problem with this survey is that it probably gives the questions equal weight. Thus, for example, it can’t know that a particular issue, like really bad suburban sprawl, could be a deal-killer for a particular city.

The survey also doesn’t allow one to express strong biases against living in particular regions, although I suppose there are good reasons not to do that: one might never consider a city – in my case, Atlanta – that one might actually enjoy living in (except that I have spent a fair amount of time in Atlanta and didn’t like it, so that’s not a good example).

Anyone know of a survey that includes non-US cities? Copenhagen, Toronto, and London would all be high on my list. Utrecht and Amsterdam would only be a little further down.

Regardless, the survey is a decent waste of a few minutes. I got even more time out of it by playing with the variables (within realistic limits for my preferences) and seeing how they impacted my results. The answer? Not much. The list remained basically stable, but the “percentage match” changed.

So, does this mean I have to start hitting up Dan Drezner’s colleagues for a job?

Filed as: cities and surveys

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.