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Posts tagged ‘quality of life’

SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC CITY CROWNED WITH TOP QUALITY OF LIFE 7th (!!) YEAR IN A ROW

Seriously America? We didn’t manage one city in the top 10?!

For the 7th consecutive year in the row, Vienna has been voted number one city in a quality of life survey of folks who work and live abroad. It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve written many a post about Vienna and her virtues and even one about her selection to this supreme place of honor but given the current climate in the US primaries, I think now is the perfect opportunity to delve a bit deeper.

Why? Because the city voted world’s most livable is the capital of a…wait for it…wait for it… social democratic country. Yep. There’s that word again.

Austria 101 in three paragraphs

First a bit of a background so that you don’t get any wrong ideas. John Oliver can attest to the fact that many of my fellow Americans are woefully ignorant in geography. In fact John Oliver might say something like, “Austria, that country in the Alps somewhere with raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and Terminator.”

Following WWII Austria found itself geopolitically situated as a neutral nation wedged between the countries of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. For decades Austria negotiated its precarious stance between two highly belligerent neighbors with diplomatic grace and finesse. Unlike Germany, after WWII Austria was spared a division of the country into east and west. It also managed to escape, unlike its neighbors to the north and east, decades of occupation by foreign powers. Unlike Switzerland, its likewise neutral neighbor to the west, Austria has become an active member of the European Union. Austria is a place where Russians, Americans, Israelis and Saudi Arabians can bump elbows at the Park Plaza buffet table and politely engage in chit chat. (https://www.kcblau.com/spy-capital/)

Austria is not capitalist, communist, socialist or corporatist (shops here are still closed on Sundays and I have come to believe that that’s something positive). It is a social democracy and has been since the end of WWII (that’s over 70 years).

Social democrats and social democracy have become buzz words lately and since I currently live in a place organized under these principles, I thought I would share some firsthand, frontline thoughts about what that means exactly.

Yes, taxes in Austria are high but…quality of life is too.

Life in the USA as Harry and Louise 

I don’t know about you but my name isn’t Walton, Koch, Goldman, Rothschild or Bush. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon dangling from pouty lips and though I loved my high school green and gold, the sports fields were baseball and football, not rugby and tennis.

My father grew up in a part of Pittsburgh where every man either worked for the steel mill or joined the military to escape it. Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel and John Cougar Melloncamp – those were the guys who sang from the soul of my roots – roots that could be like those of Harry and Louise.

Life in a Social Democracy as Harry and Louise

So what will you, Harry and Louise, find in a social democratic city?

Universal public health insurance – this means that you are not one cancer diagnosis away from personal bankruptcy or uninsurability. People search for jobs based on salary and job satisfaction, not benefits. No deductible payments for treatment and no exorbitant fees for medications (I think I pay a flat fee of about 5 bucks per prescription here).

Private health insurance: Don’t like sharing a hospital room with a snoring neighbor who has fifty relatives visit a day? Want to have a posh hospital with display cases of swords donated by former patients who happened to be sheikhs? No worries, Harry and Louise. You can get that here too. No one is going to forbid you from buying private insurance coverage.

Sick leave: Austrian law forbids firing an employee because of illness – a novel idea – you get sick or have an accident and don’t have to worry that it could also be a financial death sentence for you and your loved ones.

Maternity Leave: a year or more of paid maternity leave and what is becoming more and more common is that mom and dad split the “time off” so both get the joys of diaper changes and “Mein Pipihendl” rounds. And what does that look like back home in the US? John Oliver on Paid Family Leave.

Five weeks paid vacation by law for everyone: I swear it’s true, even for the “wage slaves” (more details here: https://www.kcblau.com/five-weeks/).

Affordable housing so well planned that there are no ghettos because

Hundertwasser housing in Vienna's 3rd district

Hundertwasser housing in Vienna’s 3rd district

subsidized housing complexes have been strategically spread throughout the city in all districts – some have even been designed by some of the city’s most famous architects – functional and livable – check out Hundertwasser’s housing for example.

Public transportation for less than a dollar a day (365 Euros a year!) that will allow you to ride all of the city’s public transportation (buses, subways, trams) and will get you anywhere you want to go in a timely and reliable manner. Like to party on the weekends? No worries about drinking and driving because the Wiener Linien always picks the short straw and will happily play designated driver and see you home safe and sound. Public transit is so popular that in 2015, 700,000 annual tickets were sold. In fact people are so in love with public transportation here that a woman from Manchester, England wrote the Vienna Public Transit a love letter when she moved away from Vienna complaining about the overpriced and unreliable transit system back in her hometown in England: Thank you for a fantastic, affordable public transport system. I miss you every day and I know someday we’ll meet again.

Free Higher Education: Can you imagine graduating from college with absolutely no debt? None? Zip? Zero? Or changing your major without having to consider the financial consequences? Vienna might not be completely made of milk and honey but this really, truly exists here. Seriously. But hey! If you want to pay and ensure that special one-on-one professor mentoring time – there are Private Universities here too. Don’t believe Harry and Louise if they try to tell you otherwise.

Pedestrian Shopping Zones: no cars and in the warm months – outdoor cafes, dining areas and plenty of room for street artists to do their thing. Because there is more to quality of life than money.

Karmeliter Market

Every Saturday you will find young and old shopping at the second district open air market, Karmeliter Market.

Parks, green areas, flowers, trees: Yes, all here. Vienna is a very “green” city.

Museums free for those 18 and under: culture and education for the kids – something we could only wish for with our 9/11 Memorial Museum.

(https://www.kcblau.com/nyc-national-september-11-museum/)

Minimum Assistance

(Mindestsicherung) – people who don’t have more than about 4000 USD to their name and can’t work because they are disabled or too old are automatically insured and entitled to financial help from the government – about 800 USD a month total. The idea is to catch disadvantaged members of society in a social net before they fall into extreme poverty. It’s called brotherly (or sisterly) love, Harry and Louise, so deal with it.

Required civil or military service: giving back to Uncle Sam (or Onkel Franz?) 6 months military or 9 months civil service. Young, able men serve their country after graduating from high school. It’s a few months in which all male members of society are equalized – regardless of the pedigree of your background. Where and when do we have that in the US? And let’s face it, many 18-year-olds could benefit from a year of figuring out what they really want to do with their futures before diving head first into the next (often expensive in the US) chapters of their lives.

Services for the elderly and disabled: transportation to the hospital for treatment, food delivery, as well as care and workshops for the mentally disabled.

Humane prisons with lower prison terms and strict regulations regarding length of solitary confinement and conditions of cells and fewer prisoners. Prisons here are not privatized because let’s face it – should someone be increasing his or her wealth based on the number of people we lock up and how long they are kept there? Kind of a scary, Orwellian idea that a rational person may have been tempted to believe would have ended with the “Cash for Kids” scandal in 2009. And one last question on this – are we truly, seriously convinced that we have the most misbehaved, criminal human beings in the entire world who would justify us having the highest number of our own citizens locked up behind bars (followed by China and Russia)? Or is $omething $eriously amiss? And don’t just take my word for it, check out the World Prison Brief numbers for the extremely depressingly, dismal reality.

High life expectancy (higher than US) (https://www.kcblau.com/usprogress/)

Water so Good it’s Constitutionally Protected

Private property – you can certainly own land, houses and apartments here but many folks choose to rent because rent prices are highly regulated and therefore renting is an affordable option.

Private businesses – your can found and run your own business here too

Life in a Social Democracy as a Property Mogul

Karmelitermarkt

High quality of life doesn’t have to be about money

I am not going to lie to you. I don’t know whether or not a Donald Trump could have made his billions here (though Richard Lugner apparently managed). At the same time, and I’m going to quote The Guardian for this: “In the mid-90s the property mogul hoped eminent domain would help move out a widow who stood in the way of a planned limousine parking lot.” Said property mogul would have not  harbored such hopes in a country where the rights of the so-called “little people” carry equal weight as their wealthier fellow countrymen.

Worth here is not based on wealth. And who of us normal mortals really believes it should be?  It would be like saying Ebenezer Scrooge in the beginning of the Christmas Carol is a far more worthy individual than Bob and Timothy Cratchit.

Worth based on honest values is a sentiment I could swear would appeal to all my freedom-loving, flag-carrying American compatriots who’ve heard the story of Abraham Lincoln’s humble beginnings since the time they could pledge allegiance to the flag. It’s what is preached in the churches that are still overflowing in the small towns every Sunday from sea to shining sea.

Glock sign

You can get a Glock in the land that makes them but you will have to undergo a psychological test first and store it under lock and key. So I can’t lie that it boggles my mind that in the US, we as a people can nod and hail “hallelujahs” as our preachers, ministers, and priests instruct us to love-our-fellow-man while we don our WWJD bracelets with the same hand clutching the 45 special under the pew, just in case that brotherly love takes a temporary hiatus.

There was a time in history when only the off-spring of the privileged elite could afford tutors and thus receive an education; a time when we packed up our undesirables and shipped them to distant shores and unknown futures; a time when where you sat on the bus or at a coffee shop depended on the color of your skin; a time when your right to vote was determined by the M or F on your birth certificate. Thank God those days are behind us.

We’ve moved to a better place since then and ensured more rights for more people. Let’s not stop now.

Part of the reason so many people fear “social democracy” is that they don’t understand what it means in day-to-day life. Fear-mongering media outlets funded by companies holding big-billed self-interests inundate the public with opinion-swaying “Harry and Louise” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_and_Louise) ads that skew the real issues. It’s simple. Should health care be a profit-oriented business? Are profit-oriented businesses the ultimate means to create a civil, socially humane nation? Do we want to live in a society where money just doesn’t talk, it talks the loudest and mutes all others from even having a voice? Is that the kind of democracy we think of when we proudly wave the stars and stripes?

As Americans isn’t it time we pause long enough from the selfies to soul-search and ask ourselves: why are so many others in the world living such a high quality of life and none of our cities have even managed the top 10 (despite our bagels, pulled porks and reubens)? Yes, let’s come together (and stop bickering) and make America great again. But let’s not do it based on hot air and empty promises. Let’s start by seeing how others have obviously managed it elsewhere.

And one last thing: Dear Harry and Louise, When you go to vote, vote based on what’s best for you and Larry and Marlene next door and your parents, and your kids and your kids’ kids, not the property moguls, bankers and opportunistic politicians whose greatest objective is to park their limos in what used to be the sweet-old-widow-down-the-street’s living room.

What the US could Learn from a Place like Austria: https://www.kcblau.com/usprogress/

Mercer Website with Survey Results: https://www.imercer.com/content/mobility/quality-of-living-city-rankings.html

Wiener Linien (Vienna Public Transportation): http://www.wienerlinien.at/eportal3/ep/contentView.do/pageTypeId/66526/programId/74577/contentTypeId/1001/channelId/-47186/contentId/82733

The Guardian article about Donald Trump’s Eminent Domain Battle:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/19/donald-trumps-eminent-domain-nearly-cost-widow-house

Forbes list of America’s Richest Families:

http://www.forbes.com/families/

Super Pacs undressed: New York Times article (“The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Elections”) on the 158 families who are funding half of the US political campaigns in the early stages: “They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male.” Read it and weep for our American “democratic” system: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/11/us/politics/2016-presidential-election-super-pac-donors.html

Article from the New York Times in Oct 2001 about Bin Ladens liquidating their holdings in the Carlyle Group (where Pres Bush worked as an adviser and former Sec of State James Baker as a partner) so as not to give the appearance that they would be profiting from the War on Terrorism that would ensue after 9/11: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/26/business/bin-laden-family-liquidates-holdings-with-carlyle-group.html

In case you missed the link above: Economist article from 2003 (!) about the Bush family and their link to the Carlyle Group http://www.economist.com/node/1875084 – “At a time when America is aggressively promoting democracy and capitalism abroad, including by military means, it would be helpful if its politicians and businesses were regarded as cleaner than clean. Shrouded in secrecy, Carlyle calls capitalism into question.”

Private vs. Public – what is good for the general population is not always good for private industry – let us not forget history and why many US cities no longer have the public transportation options that a city like Vienna does:
Documentary Taken for a Ride Part 1, Taken for a Ride Part 2

Schoenbrunn Park in Vienna

Schönbrunn Park in Vienna

 

 

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WHAT WE CAN LEARN IN THE USA FROM A PLACE LIKE AUSTRIA

“Give me the strength to change the things I can, the courage to endure the things I can’t and the wisdom to recognize the difference.”

“Don’t compare. It’s neither better nor worse, it’s just different.“ Print This Post

If It Were My Home

Chart Comparing the US to Austria from the Country Comparison Website: If It Were My Home (click on image for enlarged view)

Rule # 1 of being an exchange student is simply another way of pounding into bright-eyed, bushy-tailed homesick teens that to truly enjoy their experience abroad, and get the most out their host country, they will have to come equipped with an open mind.

When you spend an entire lifetime driving the half-a-block to the grocery store, you tend to become misled by the notion that the car is indeed the right way and only possible way to fetch your groceries.

Exchange Student Rule # 1, however, is an over- simplified message for about-to-be overwhelmed globetrotters. But for 16- and 17-year olds spending a year in some faraway land, perhaps their first time away from all that is familiar, I’d venture that, yes, it is a good rule to follow. Definitely do not compare their fork-and-knife eating pizza habits to our shove-it-in-your-mouth methods. Frankly, can we really be sure that Uncle Ted truly did wash his hands when he came in from the bushes and dug into the Pepperoni extra cheese.

But at some point, if we strive to grow and progress, life demands that we adopt Global Adult Rule # 1, which, God help us all, if I were Supreme Ruler of the World, I’d make required reading for all those entering adulthood.

Golden Adult Rule # 1: Encounter the world with a mature mind, able to weigh pros and cons honestly and without the rose-colored glasses of pride or ego in order to maintain a forward moving pace.

One can imagine that the first cave dwellers to slap some hide around their tired, calloused, bloodied, hairy, feet must have suffered ridicule from the cave clan one valley over. But as the smoke and drum beats from the shoed community seeped into the quiet, hungry corners of the cranky, sore-footed neighbor valley, ridicule must have dissipated into cautious skepticism. Maybe perhaps, it is definitely theoretically possible, that those frequent mammoth feasts are made possible by hunters who can run faster and track over greater distances. But who wants to admit they’re wrong and outdone? We’ll just go on with our grim bare-footed ways. But the storm gates of progress are not to be contained. No doubt, some buck-wild, bare-footed Neanderthal teen crashed the Friday night all-you-can-eat mammoth happy hour with his big-toed buddies and scored a pair of shiny, new, leathery-soft, prehistoric Pradas in the midnight pin-the-tail on the megaloceros competition and shoes went viral and feet have never been quite as pained and ugly since.

To think that any society can progress – technically or socially — by its citizens barricading themselves behind stone walls of obstinate obliviousness is to damn ourselves to darkness.

Pakistan flood in Texas

If the 2010 Pakistan flood that had directly killed 2000 people had hit Texas.

And that’s what’s so great about the website, If It Were My Home. Originally the creators wanted to make disasters more real for the folks at home by enabling users to transpose maps of natural catastrophes to any part of the globe (you can see, for example, what it would be like if the 2010 Pakistan massive flood had struck climate-change denier, Senator Ted Cruz’s home state of Texas). Later the creators of the website used the official figures from national government and international organizations to enable direct comparisons between two countries. How different would my life be if I lived in Austria rather than the US? Well…let’s have a look.

In the US, my friends and family can expect to enjoy 9.2% less free time, spend 64.5% more on healthcare, and die a whopping 0.61 years sooner than those of us in Austria. On the downside, I’ll probably earn 19.3% less money than my counterparts in the US. But in a place with free public universities, universal healthcare, and a public transportation system that charges just 1€/day for annual tickets, who needs more money?

Years ago, there was a trio of old ladies on a US commercial for a fast food chain whose no-nonsense attitude shot them to instantaneous fame. As Granny # 1 jammed her wire-rimmed eye glasses into the big white fluffy bun of the competitor, Granny Peller, clutching her handbag and stretching her lace-collared neck for a better look, demanded, “Where’s the beef?”

In the States, when we tout our greatest-nation-on-earth status, what are we comparing and to whom? Every country I have ever visited thinks itself the greatest. India boasts that it’s the world’s largest democracy, Greece, the world’s oldest and Norway can brag about having the most qualitative. All countries have something to puff out their chests about. Yet an intelligent conversation leading to progress demands an end to platitudes and a comparison based on real figures. Yes, Granny Peller, “Where’s the beef?!”

Comparisons can be dicey. When one side is clearly better, the limping lag-behind is bound to get defensive and lash out. We like our big-toed bunion blistered bare feet! You shoed footed sissies need to trot on back over to that valley of yours and stop all that stupid drumming and grilling! But as modern, intelligent, humans, we must hope, at some point, to have reached the maturity to leave our egos in the cave beside the spears and hammer-stones, and venture to the valley across the mighty mountain and icy river to learn, transfer and improve. And you know what? We might find that those cave crocs are great but could sure use some traction for the stony paths, fur for the winter and color for the misses.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish ways.

I do not believe that Austrians are less criminally-minded. I am also not convinced Americans have a violence gene that makes them more prone to murder each other. Despite the wonderful Alpine air, I highly doubt that “frische Luft” is the reason for fewer infancy deaths here.

So why such differences? Isn’t it time we stop the platitudes, check our egos, climb the mountains, and change the things we can?

Print This Post Some sites to check out:

Country comparisons and transposable global disaster maps If It Were My Home Website

Check out these Instructions for Prehistoric Pumps. Bound to be the buzz at any paleontology party. People will be emulating you as the picture of progress.

Article from the New York Times about archeological find of prehistoric shoes complete with image of Prehistoric Prada found under sheep dung.

And just for fun: Shoes vs. Beer – which is progress? Check out Heineken’s take on the matter: https://youtu.be/zZfy0gpIARE

Where’s the Beef Commercial on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug75diEyiA0

Where’s the Beef Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_the_beef%3F

Global Democracy Ranking site: Compare Rankings of Countries

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