Amazon HQ2

[brando]

Originally Posted by paul78701

Having not seen the article, I'm guessing that their "evaluation" is like many others. They pick and choose their categories to evaluate on, assign an arbitrary weight for each, score each city per category, and then compile overall city scores.

I hardly think that this is the appropriate way to predict the winner.

Those initial rankings were very very basic in terms of general terms related to Amazon's press release. Those lists included very superficial evaluations of the cities.


"The Wall Street Journal used Amazon's criteria, interviews with site-selection experts and people familiar with Amazon's thinking to come up with a list of potential locations for a new corporate center.

The Journal then ranked each city based on factors in the company's request for proposals, using an equally weighted index to average the cumulative scores. The more bars there are in each category of the radar plots, the higher the ranking."


Methodology:


*Newark includes all of Northern New Jersey

COLLEGE POPULATION: Percentage of population that is college educated.

TECH LABOR FORCE: Total labor force in a tech occupation. Includes tech jobs not in the tech industry.

FISCAL HEALTH: Cities are scored on metrics including ratio of general fund balance to expenditures; ratio of pension contributions to total government-wide revenues; change in unemployment rate in 2015; and change in property values in 2015.

COST OF LIVING: Estimated cost of living for mid-management households by weighting different consumer expenditure categories.

CULTURAL FIT: Sites that reflect "Cultural Community Fit" and "Community/Quality of Life" as outlined in the Amazon request-for-proposals. Strong universities, diverse population, recreational opportunities, and an overall high quality of life. Excludes government incentive packages.

STATE TAX RANK: Rank of tax rates (​including corporate, income and property-tax ranks). One is lowest tax state, 50 is highest tax state.



You need to remember these ratings are not absolute. They are relative to competing bids. For example, yes there are a lot of students in Austin relative to the overall population but the absolute number of college students is much lower than a lot of larger metroplexes. A lot of Austin's lower ranks are as a result of the overall lower population.

Austin scored very high in Cultural Fit (Purple) and State Tax Rank (Yellow). It scored above average in Cost of Living (Red). It scored low in Fiscal Health (Green), Tech Labour Force (Orange) and College Educated Population (blue).



This doesn't even take the tax incentives into account.