Quality of Life Measurement

June 2nd, 2010
ideas, money, politics
It's hard to measure how happy people are with their society, but such a measure would be useful both for directing policy and in aid work. One approach is the GNH or "Gross National Happiness" system which rates sustainable development, cultural integrity, ecosystem conservation, and good governance positively. Other rough approximations are the fraction of people living above some consumption level (more than $1 per day) or the equality level. All of these have the problem that outside groups are saying "these are the things that we value, so we will estimate your happiness by how much of these things you have". The other direction, just asking people how happy they are, gives you the problem that one person's "very happy" might be another person's "satisfactory". Worse, culture plays into this strongly, with some cultures looking more negatively on complaining than others, so we might decide that country X is worse off than country Y just because country Y's people are less willing to admit to unhappiness.

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:

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 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.

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

Julia (15y, via fb):link

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.

Recent posts on blogs I like:

The Weekly Anthropocene Interviews Me

I have been interviewed by The Weekly Anthropocene. It’s sort of a grab bag of all the topics we talk about on this blog—some effective altruism, some general life advice. I really enjoyed getting to talk to Sam Matey, who’s a very smart guy. Check it out!

via Thing of Things January 6, 2025

Two missionary memoirs

The lives of people who worked admirably hard toward a goal I find pointless The post Two missionary memoirs appeared first on Otherwise.

via Otherwise January 6, 2025

Dance Calling By The Numbers, 2024

This post contains javascript content and must be viewed on site.

via Harris Lapiroff January 6, 2025

more     (via openring)