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Is Venezuela’s socialist leader Nicolas Maduro trying to act like an advert for how not to run a country? It sure looks like that.
Caracas, the country’s capital, now ranks as the least liveable large city in the western hemisphere, according to new research from the Economist Intelligence Unit.
It’s doing pretty badly on the global scale as well. It ranked 131 out of a total of 140 cities evaluated by the recent research.
At the top is Vienna in Austria with an overall rating of 99.1. That city gets a perfect score of 100 for stability, healthcare, education, and infrastructure. It was close to perfection with its culture/environment where it scored 96.3.
Compare that to Caracas. It got an overall score of 46.9. Stability and healthcare were given ratings of 35 and 33.3, respectively. Education, infrastructure, and culture/ environment got scores of 66.7, 53.6 and 56.3, respectively.
The overall low score placed Caracas in the bottom 10 cities. Or put another way, 93% of the cities evaluated were more liveable, according to my reckoning.
Caracas isn’t ranked much higher than Damascus, the capital city of Syria, which has suffered a brutal civil war since 2011. Damascus got a score of 30.7, which made it rank very last of all the places listed in the report. It should be evident that Syria isn’t a liveable country given the years of continuing military action.
But Caracas hasn’t suffered a war. Instead, the problem the city has been hurt by the same things that afflict the whole of Venezuela: Socialism.
Not long ago, Venezuela was the wealthiest country in South America. Now it is a basket case ravaged by hyperinflation and an imploding economy.