Quality of Life Measurement |
June 2nd, 2010 |
ideas, money, politics |
Another approach, described as Quality of Life Island involves people indicating how willing they would be to leave their society for a specific alternative 'island'. The idea is that the more willing you are to leave then the worse your society must be. Briefly:
While I like the idea of having people make choices, I don't think this works at all. As a person in any society, I either would rather move to the island, or rather not move. If I pick 0% happy, I move. If I pick 100% happy I don't move. Why would I choose anything in between? I don't actually think this is a crucial flaw, however, as you could just ask a random sampling of people whether they would like to move or not, and then your happiness level is the fraction saying they would not like to move. Because we're working with binary data, we do need to ask more people in each society to get good numbers, though.Then random people and families from around the world could be asked for their cutoff island quality of life, the level they would require to move to the island. If this quality was less than a previously randomly generated quality offer, they would actually move to the island. These quality values could then be the data on which to base a better estimate of quality of life around the world and across time. To maximize the amount of this data, at perhaps some sacrifice in quality, one could ask larger groups for their cutoff value, but only actually make the pre-generated offers to a small random subset.
While it's pretty expensive to actually move people, immigration does give you an approximation of this measure. That many more mexicans want to move to the usa than the reverse indicates that the quality of life in the usa is better than in mexico. That people are leaving the usa's northeast for the south and west indicates something similar.
Update 2010-06-02: The author responded to a question by email to tell me that he meant that the people choose amounts of money. Which makes a lot more sense, and gives you non-binary values.
Comment via: facebook
In the case of Mexico (and lots of other immigration situations), you actually have a lot of young men migrating so their families can stay home and have more income. It's not necessarily a good indicator that they would rather be in the US than Mexico.
In a way, suicide is a kind of immigration that's available to everyone. But culture affects it - people believe different things about what happens when you die. Also, suicide is a more socially responsible option if you have life insurance and a safety net than if your death means your children won't eat. So in the case of the Mexican peasant, even if he hates his life in Mexico, he's serving his family best to cross the Rio Grande rather than the Joradn.