Ranking of the Safest Cities to Lose Your Wallet

Reader´s Digest recently conducted a thought-provoking experiment. They “misplaced” something in 12 different cities of the world to then see who would be the most honest. I’ll let you in on some of the results. In first place is Helsinki (Finland), followed by Mumbai (India) and Budapest (Hungary). Madrid is down the list at number 9.

Tapestry of Dharavi – Mumbai via ToGa Wanderings

Losing your wallet

Who hasn’t left their wallet somewhere, forgotten it in a bar, in a taxi, on a bus, on the bench or in a restaurant? We usually think that it will never reappear, but sometimes the wallet found by someone who decides to return it and takes it to the police station. What would you do? Would you return it? It’s easy enough to talk about doing good deeds, but much harder to actually do them.

For this study, a total of 12 wallets were deposited in each of the 19 selected cities. Inside was an ID, a family picture, a phone number (which was important to the study), several lottery tickets, 50 euros and several credit cards. And the results were… In Helsinki (Finland) 11 of 12 were returned, in Mumbai (India) 9 of 12, in Budapest (Hungary) and New York (USA) 8 of 12 were retrieved, in Amsterdam 7 of 12, in Berlin (Germany) and Ljubljana (Slovenia) 6 of 12, in London (United Kingdom) and Warsaw (Poland) 5 of 12, in Bucharest (Romania), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Zurich (Switzerland) only 4 of 12, in Prague (Czech Republic ) 3 of 12, in Madrid (Spain ) 2 of 12 and Lisbon (Portugal ) only 1 was returned, meaning that 11 disappeared completely. In the other countries that were analyzed, they failed to recover even one single wallet. They simply vanished.

The first world sometimes deceives

I think it’s worth calling attention to several cases, starting with Mumbai which holds second place in the list. The chaos of India and the city’s extreme poverty contrasts with these results, since 9 of 12 wallets were returned there. This means only 3 remained unreturned. And most importantly, we could roughly say that it is a safer city (or at least with more honest people) than Prague, Lisbon, New York, Berlin, London, Warsaw and Madrid. The first world can be misleading sometimes. The most honest, though, in this case are the Finns. Maybe it has to do with the standard of living and way of being there. Salaries are relatively high in comparison with other countries in the ranking, and Finns tend to be a peaceful and believing people. This may have something to do with it. And although Finns and Indians don’t have much in common, they do agree in this respect of citizen safety. I don’t want to upset anyone, but not everyone is equally generous with others. But, beyond the anecdote, one shouldn’t really generalize. It’s somewhat the same everywhere you