Cost of Living Comparison

I've been so fortunate to live in different cities. One thing people kept and still keep asking me is the cost of living and how it compares in different countries/cities.

Every time I try to formulate my naive "qualitative" response to such comparison questions, most people come up immediately with their own unfounded "uber-quantitative" analysis. 90% of the time bottled water price becomes the ultimate benchmark, which I find quite annoying.

With this post, once and for all I am trying to show how one can easily compare cost of living in different cities.

Je crois entendre encore

Aria from Les pêcheurs de perles by Georges Bizet...

 

Quantitative Prediction for the Turkish General Election 2015

Final opinion polls are published. As of May 28, opinion polls are banned. At this stage of the campaign I wanted to model my quantitative prediction.

This is basically a meta-analysis. The idea is to combine different polls using weighted average. In a normal average, each data point contributes equally to the result. In a weighted average, some data points contribute more than others. I analyze how each polling organization performed in the past and consider (weigh) their latest 2015 predictions according their past performance.