Dialogue: Top city appraisal asinine

Are people making a fuss about it? Yes, they are. Does it mean anything? No, it doesn't. Is it the acme of meaninglessness? Yes, it is. Did I write meaninglessness just because I like the word? Yes, I did.

What am I banging on about? I'll tell you.

What I am banging on about is the annual global quality of life survey. And if that title isn't enough to make you suspect the proximity of meaninglessness, let me tell you that the people who conducted the survey are employment consultants, and, furthermore, that they go under the name of William M. Mercer.

The M tells you all you need to know.

Every year, William M. Mercer's organisation ranks the cities of the world according to the quality of life that they afford their citizens. This year, Auckland has crept into the top 10 cities in their unappealing catalogue. And because we are a little-boy country in a big boys' world, we are trumpeting the triumph through the land.

I do not know what criteria William M. Mercer uses to rank the cities of the world but I can guess. How dear are the houses? How dense the traffic? How accessible the hospitals? How heavy the rates? How benign the climate? How big the salaries? These and other vacuities have been fed into a computer and out have slithered the rankings. And so we learn that New York is better than Rome, and London better than New York, and Auckland better than London, and Vancouver and Zurich equally better than anywhere else on the planet.

According to William M. Mercer, the quality of life in Vancouver and Zurich so stimulates the soul that it is impossible for any of their citizens to do other than rejoice.

And how do I begin to demonstrate the fatuity of all this? Let me start with the word quality. It is a word that has been stolen. Time was when quality meant merely thisness. It passed no judgment.

But then the advertisers moved in. For them it was an easy and an almost pardonable step to observe that the quality of something could make it superior to something else. And from there it was inevitable but not pardonable that they made the word a synonym for goodness.

They speak of quality cars, a phrase bereft of meaning. The true meaning of the word is now quite beyond retrieval, but we can still beware of its false purveyors.

William M. Mercer and his merry band of consultants have not the least idea of anything that matters. If one were to build a city on the moon and supply it with an unfailing climate, an artificial beach and suburbs patrolled by fat security guards with bulging armpits and with never a stinging spider or a hint of a thief to threaten the unobstructed bliss of heaven, and if William M. Mercer's consultants were to pay this sterile wonderland a visit with their clipboards and their asininity, I have no doubt they would judge it to be paradise and with any luck they would go there permanently to be crass together without danger.

Their vision is of the world as shopping mall. It is a world where everything can be measured. It is a world as meaningless as bingo.

Mr Mercer does his survey for the emotionally neutered corporate men, the pig-eyed flyers of business class. Mr Mercer is advising them where next to hang their Rolex watches and their inexcusable calfskin shoes.

For the benefit of these people, Mr Mercer has attempted in his crass but no doubt sincere way to bring his net down on the butterfly called happiness. But he has not just missed the butterfly. He has missed the meadow.

For let any of us consider for a nanosecond what it is that makes life worth living, that supplies, in Mr Mercer's hideous phrase, the quality of life. A moment's pause will tell us that geography means nothing and the public transport system even less, that it is possible to rejoice in a dungheap and despair in a palace.

And my mind goes back some 20 years to when I was living in one of the least pleasing cities of the world.

I lived in a dark and dirty room that held a bed and nothing else and I shared a bathroom and a kitchen with two mad women, a parrot and a mute. The streets were a perpetual clamour of people, grass was as rare as sunshine and I had very little money.

But there in that drab city for reasons of inner weather I was so intently alive that its buildings were suffused for me with gold and I would kiss the scabs on the beggars' dogs.

Measure that, Mr Mercer, measure that.