Quote:
Originally Posted by LeftCoaster
It's based off the responses of those in the financial industry, so it's highly subjective. The good thing is it's based off the subjectivity of those in the industry, so at least Canadian cities are top of mind for these people.
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I've seen this kind of methodology before and in some cases it works, and in other cases it's a ludicrously anecdotal echo chamber.
If you have an industry where you know there are 5 players, and you ask 4 of them to comment on their competitors, you might get a fairly accurate snapshot of that industry.
However, if you have an industry as vast and vaguely defined as "the financial industry" and you ask a non-random sample of people questions like "where would
you want to live?" and "which country do
you think has potential in [vaguely-defined field]", you're going to get meaningless answers.
I find Canadian cities rank highly in non-randomized online surveys of anything, just because Canadians have an oversized internet presence. Being majority English-speaking certainly helps on the Internet; also, there might be a certain cultural
je ne sais quois about Canadians that leads them to post their thoughts to forums and social media more than residents of other countries - even large, English-speaking countries.
This sub-forum is a great example. Relative to our population, Canadians probably represent a higher percentage of this forum's traffic than any other country so much that we can sustain our own, very active sub-forum. Now, a higher percent of Canadians probably live and/or work in a skyscraper than Americans, and our cities have some exciting projects relative to their size, but are our cities and our projects that much more a part of our lives compared to, say, the average Australian? Or the average Singaporean? They have sub-forums, but they're positively moribund in comparison. Or what about countries where there are millions of English speakers, internet use is high among the middle class and development is on fire, like Mumbai? When it comes to skyscrapers under construction, our tallest isn't even the global top 250! Anyway, there's something about Canadians on the internet...