The “cost of living” is highly subjective

[Note to readers: This post is not about inflation. The rate of inflation is a little bit subjective, but much less subjective than the cost of living.]

In my previous post, I discussed Singapore. Today’s FT has an article on Singapore, which contains this interesting fact:

The city, one of Asia’s main financial centres, has been ranked the world’s most expensive for nine of the past 11 years by the annual Worldwide Cost of Living survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit.

That surprised me for a couple reasons.