Putting Out the Vibe Random observations from my day-to-day life

I finish grad school this spring.  Which means I will have to become a real person.  Which also means I’m currently in the midst of a job search.  As if this weren’t stressful enough, I also have the daunting task of figuring out where I want to live for the next few years.  I was thinking about this while sitting through a lecture on Utility Analysis of Healthcare Decisions last Friday and think I came up with a fool proof method. My conclusion: Delaware is the worst place to live in the US (from a completely unbiased, 23 year old, male perspective).  When it comes down to it, my criteria for choosing a place to live boil down to the following:

1. Price of Beer
2. Attractiveness of Women
3. Cost of Living
4. Weather
5. Music Entertainment
6. Sports Entertainment

1. Price of Beer
Beer currently constitutes a healthy chunk of my monthly credit card bill and, although I hope this spending will decrease when I become a real person, I’m sure it won’t disappear completely.  On Pintprice.com, users submit beer prices from cities all over the world and I was able to obtain hundreds of pint prices from US cities and calculate a per state average.

Limitations: Reporting of average pint price is voluntary, and therefore the sample size isn’t consistent; no data is available for Idaho and Wyoming (people must not drink there); the website didn’t indicate the recency of any of the prices.  Assumptions: Any submitted beer price <$1 was an outlier and therefore thrown out.

2. Attractiveness of Women
Since I’m single, this is an important one since I’m likely to date some ladies in my new home town and attractiveness would be a plus.  Also, my stock is probably only going down at this point.  I figured that a decent predictor of female attractiveness in my hypothetical new state would be America’s Health Ratings.  The data is expressed as a percent deviation from the national norm.

3. Cost of Living
In addition to beer prices being reasonable, since I’ll likely buy things other than beer once in a while, a low overall cost of living would probably be nice. The US Government’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), although not exactly cost of living, is a pretty good indicator of this.

Assumptions: I would live near a large city in each state (since CPI represents urban areas).  Limitations: If no CPI state data was available, I took regional average (shown above in italic).

4. Weather
Living in Wisconsin can be rough and when Winter seems to span from September until May during some years, it’s hard not to think about places like California and Florida.  Living in a place that has nicer weather that Wisconsin would probably improve my well-being (especially during January and February).  To analyze weather by state, I used the National Climate Data Center’s Average Percent of Possible Sunshine data.

5. Music Entertainment
Entertainment offered is crucial to having a social life outside of work and since I like concerts, plays, and especially Neil Diamond, I felt I needed to include this factor.  If cost of living is low, but there is nothing worthwhile to spend my extra money on anyway, I might as well just move back in with my parents.  To try to represent how many concerts are offered in each state, on 9-27-09, I searched ticketmaster.com for musical events in each state.

6. Sports Entertainment
Another important entertainment factor is how many sporting events I will be able to attend.  Therefore, I included in my analysis the total number of major professional sports teams in each state.

Assumptions: Since I would rather watch Wisconsin Badger football or basketball over any professional sport, I added an additional professional sport to Wisconsin’s total.  For geographic purposes, I included Washington D.C. as a part of Maryland.  Also, this data assumes that I care about the NBA.  In reality, in the last decade, I have really only attended pro football and baseball games.

Results

To compare results across the six criteria, I linearly transformed the data to a 0 to 100 scale.  The equation to obtain this new score is shown at right.  If low values were preferred instead of high values (such as price of beer and CPI), the result was subtracted from one before multiplying by 100.  After applying this transformation to the data, the following scores result.

In averaging the six criteria (instead of using a weighted average with importance ratings for each criteria) to calculate my overall state ranking, I’m assuming that they are of equal importance.  In reality, living somewhere with cheap beer is probably much more important than living somewhere with attractive women.  So there you have it.  It looks like I’ll be applying as much as possible in California, while avoiding Delaware like the plague.  Feel free to suggest any additional criteria that you think I should have included in my analysis.

Update 10-5-09: The complete data that I used to reach these results can be found here.