Best places to retire?
There’s a fun visualisation in the Herald of best places in NZ to retire. Chris Knox’s design lets you adjust the relative importance of a set of factors, and also see which factors are responsible for a good or bad ranking for your favorite region. For nerds, he’s even put up the code and data.
If you play around with the sliders enough, you can get Dunedin or Christchurch to the top, but you can’t get Auckland or Wellington there. Since about 30% of people over 65 actually do live in those two cities, there’s presumably some important decision factors that are left out and that would make cities look better if they were put in.
There’s at least two sorts of factors. First, that many people live in cities. You might well want to retire somewhere close to your friends and whānau. Second, that you want the amenities of a city: public transport, taxis, libraries, cinemas, museums, stadiums, fair-quality cheap restaurants.
The interactive is just for fun, but similar principles apply to serious decision-making tools. The ‘best’ decision depends a lot on your personal criteria for ‘best’, and oversimplifying these criteria will give you something that looks like an objective, data-based policy choice, but really isn’t.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »