I’m supposed to believe that Osaka is more expensive than Paris and nothing is more expensive than living in Moscow? This might be evidence that parallel universes exist.

Every year Mercer Human Resource Consulting releases a list every year that always gets airplay; unfortunately, this list isn’t what everyone thinks, but that’s usually what happens when the press gets something that doesn’t fit in a sound byte. You know it as “The World’s Most Expensive Cities“, but this isn’t the full name; the actual name is “List of most expensive cities for expatriate employees” and not many people really know what or how it’s calculated.

One of the main problems is that they hold the finer details of how everything is calculated away from prying eyes; you end up knowing what they’re looking at (isn’t it blindingly obvious?), but you don’t know the exacts: are they buying what everyone else eats?, do they live in an up-scale place?, where do their kids go to school? These are all simple things to those that grew up in the area (or lived there for a while), but it can be very different for anyone that is only there for business.

Almost every magazine/website that writes about the list drops the “expatriate employee” thing, but this is the thing that gives you the correct perspective of the whole list; this list isn’t telling you the most expensive city in the world, it’s a list for companies who are sending mid/high level employees to another country. This fact brings along other things that help you see the list for what it really is; this is a list that shows you if the life for someone living in Manhattan would be more or less expensive in another city. They don’t take into consideration any government subsidies or cultural norms that would affect diet, where someone lives, how large of a place they would be living in, fashion, and other possessions.

Honestly, I don’t have much of a problem with Mercer’s list – they openly state the main purpose of the list – my issue is that this is consistently misreported, which gives you this and this. Since it’s reported the way that it does it’s actually quite difficult to find which city is actually the most expensive to live in (it’s certainly not Moscow); there are other lists that you can find, but they are all geared toward western habits. Some lists aren’t bad, but none of them tell us what we are led to believe.