Honest cities!

Mumbai seems to be the second most honest city in the world, after Helsinki, Finland! 

In a study of ethics, morals and responsibilities by researchers for Reader’s Digest, conducted across 16 cities, Helsinki in Finland topped the list, which involved dropping 12 wallets containing the local equivalent of GBP 30 in each of the selected cities, and tracking the return rates. 

The cities considered for this study, and the overall results are as below. You can read more in this report from the Daily Mail, which also provides some interesting sidelights about the study, including the consideration of the relative value of GBP 30 in each of the countries sampled.

Now, this rating sounds great for India. And a good part of the results seem to reflect the general perception of honesty in each city. 

But being the skeptic that I am, I wonder if the relative rankings of some of these cities could have been different, had the sampling of cities and countries been different. For instance, I don’t see any city from Italy, or from any country in South-East Asia. Also, except for Mumbai, New York and Rio de Janeiro (apparent outliers), all other cities sampled are from Europe (let’s not consider Moscow for this exercise: we - and sometimes they - are never sure!). So the distribution may well be skewed, geographically, in my view.

Nonetheless, a good read!