Happy life-expectancy

One of the aims of social indicator research is to develop a comprehensive measure of quality-of-life in nations that is analogous to GNP in economic indicator research. For that purpose, several multi dimensional indexes have been proposed. In addition to economic performance, these also acknowledge the nation's success in matters like schooling and social equality. The most current indicator of this type is the ‘Human Development Index’. In this approach QOL is measured by input; the degree to which society provides conditions deemed beneficial (‘presumed’ QOL). The basic problem is that one never knows to what extent the cherished provisions are really good for people. An alternative is measuring QOL in nations by output, and consider how well people actually flourish in the country. This ‘apparent’ QOL can be measured by the degree to which citizens live long and happily. This conception is operationalized by combining registration based estimates of length-of-life, with survey data on subjective appreciation-of-life. Life-expectancy in years is multiplied by average happiness on a 0–1 scale. The product is named ‘Happy Life-Expectancy’ (HLE), and can be interpreted as the number of years the average citizen in a country lives happily at a certain time. HLE was assessed in 48 nations in the early 1990's. It appears to be highest in North-West European nations (about 60) and lowest in Africa (below 35). HLE scores are systematically higher in nations that are most affluent, free, educated, and tolerant. Together, these country-characteristics explain 70% of the statistical variance in HLE. Yet HLE is not significantly related to unemployment, state welfare and income equality, nor to religiousness and trust in institutions. HLE does not differ either with military dominance and population pressure. The conclusion is that HLE qualifies as the envisioned comprehensive social indicator. It has both clear substantive meaning (happy life-years) and theoretical significance (ultimate output measure). HLE differentiates well. Its correlations fit most assumptions about required input, but also challenge some. The indicator is likely to have political appeal.     

Why Social Policy Needs Subjective Indicators

There are many qualms about subjective indicators, and some believe that social policy would be better for not using them. This paper consists of a review of these objections. It is argued that policy makers need subjective indicators, the main reasons being: 1. Social policy is never limited to merely material matters; it is also aimed at matters of mentality. These substantially subjective goals require subjective indicators. 2. Progress in material goals can not always be measured objectively. Subjective measurement is often better. 3. Inclusive measurement is problematic with objective substance. Current sum-scores make little sense. Using subjective satisfaction better indicates comprehensive quality. 4. Objective indicators do little to inform policy makers about public preferences. Since the political process also does not reflect public preferences too well, policy makers need additional information from opinion polls. 5. Policy makers must distinguish between `wants' and `needs’. Needs are not observable as such, but their gratification materialises in the length and happiness of peoples' lives. This final output criterion requires assessment of subjective appreciation of life-as-a-whole     

Income inequality and fertility: A comparative view

Summary Most studies pertaining to the relationship between population and economic development suffer from a major flaw. Researchers use aggregate measures like income or energy consumption per head as indicators of economic development. Such aggregate measures fail to take into account the nature of the distribution of income or energy consumption to the population. The present study attempts to demonstrate the importance of incorporating the nature of distribution of resources as an important intervening variable in the study of the overall relationship between population and economic development. A measure of income inequality is developed which represents the difference between rural and urban incomes. This measure is justified in terms of the distinctiveness of urban and rural sectors in the process of development. The data used relate to societal measures of fertility, income, income inequality, etc. Consistently with existing literature, we observe that, generally speaking, economic development does entail a reduction in rural-urban income inequalities. On the other hand, a substantial part of the negative effect of an increase in income per head can be nullified if such an increase were not also accompanied by a reduction in rural-urban income inequality. Also, a substantial part of the negative effect of an increase in income per head and the level of education in reducing the level of infant mortality would be nullified if it did not also result in a reduction of rural-urban income inequality. On the other hand, it is quite possible for the level of education in a society to increase together with an increase in income per head without substantially altering the extent of inequality of income between the rural and the urban population. It is suggested that the positive relationship between rural-urban income inequality and the level of fertility is due to higher rural fertility rates in a high-inequality country. By implication, this would mean that higher standards of living for the rural population compared with its urban counterpart will have a favourable impact in reducing rural fertility.     

Will Money Increase Subjective Well-Being?

Four replicable findings have emerged regardingthe relation between income and subjectivewell-being (SWB): 1. There are largecorrelations between the wealth of nations andthe mean reports of SWB in them, 2. There aremostly small correlations between income andSWB within nations, although these correlationsappear to be larger in poor nations, and therisk of unhappiness is much higher for poorpeople, 3. Economic growth in the last decadesin most economically developed societies hasbeen accompanied by little rise in SWB, andincreases in individual income lead to variableoutcomes, and 4. People who prize materialgoals more than other values tend to besubstantially less happy, unless they are rich.Thus, more money may enhance SWB when it meansavoiding poverty and living in a developednation, but income appears to increase SWBlittle over the long-term when more of it isgained by well-off individuals whose materialdesires rise with their incomes. Several majortheories are compatible with most existingfindings: A. The idea that income enhances SWBonly insofar as it helps people meet theirbasic needs, and B. The idea that the relationbetween income and SWB depends on the amount ofmaterial desires that people's income allowsthem to fulfill. We argue that the firstexplanation is a special case of the secondone. A third explanation is relativelyunresearched, the idea that societal norms forproduction and consumption are essential tounderstanding the SWB-income interface. Inaddition, it appears high SWB might increasepeople's chances for high income. We review theopen issues relating income to SWB, anddescribe the research methods needed to provideimproved data that will better illuminate thepsychological processes relating money to SWB.     

Fertility and income,consumption aspirations,and child quality standards

Data from a 1975 national survey of the American population were used to investigate the relationships between childbearing and aspirations for consumption goods, child quality standards, and income. The data were consistent with the hypothesis that preferences for child quality are negatively related to fertility. Aspirations for consumer goods which are related to the home were not found to be negatively related to childbearing while aspirations for nonhome goods were negatively related to fertility as hypothesized. Several indicators of income and subjective economic well-being were examined, and the overall pattern of results was not supportive of the hypothesized effect of income on fertility.     

Social Capital or Social Cohesion: What Matters For Subjective Well-Being?

The theoretical analysis of the concepts of social capital and of social cohesion shows that social capital should be considered as a micro concept whereas social cohesion, being a broader concept than social capital, is a more appropriate concept for macro analysis. Therefore, we suggest that data on the individual level should only be used to analyze the relationship between social capital, social cohesion indicators and subjective well-being and that they do not allow commenting on the level of social cohesion in a society. For this last type of analyses aggregated indicators of social cohesion have to be computed which is not the issue of this paper. Our empirical analysis is based on individual data for Luxembourg in 2008. In general, our results suggest that investments in social capital generate monetary returns (increased income) and psychic returns (increased subjective well-being) even in a highly developed and multicultural country like Luxembourg. When we are adding on the micro level variables representing the economic domain of social cohesion following Bernard (1999), then we observe that this domain also has an effect on income and on subjective well-being. Therefore, we recommend including the economic domain in any future analysis using the concept of social cohesion.     

Doing better than the optimum

There may be a need for operationalizing basic social indicators like unemployment, inflation, crime, and others in such a way as to allow for going beyond what has traditionally been considered as the zero point of unemployment, inflation, crime, or other social indicators. Doing so can be helpful in stimulating greater societal achievement and happiness, especially with appropriate incentives and a growth perspective. Doing so can also facilitate better comparisons of alternative policies across nations and across other policies.     

A further consideration of the human aspects of economic readjustment in Hungary

The economic transition to a market economy has not only caused severe economic disruption in the nations of Central and Eastern Europe but also uncertainty among the population. This study presents indicators of the Hungarian population's perceptions and expectations with respect to levels of inflation, unemployment and poverty. A survey of published social and quality of life indicators revealed that the necessary information to carry out this study was not available. Instead, data from a monthly Hungarian Gallup Institute sample poll was obtained and this information was disaggregated by income classification and place of residence to show the differential effect of these factors. The study shows that lower income groups and residents of smaller places are generally more concerned about the future prospects of unemployment and inflation than higher income groups and residents of larger places. Given the level of unemployment, however, which even to June 1992 was relatively low by international standards, a very large proportion of the overall population are concerned about the possibility of becoming unemployed. The volatility of public perceptions toward the variables considered in the study is clearly shown for all classifications by income and residence, many of which would seem to have no logical explanation. In all groupings, pessimism about the future has increased over the period considered.     

Gender equality and the sex differential in mortality from accidents in high income nations

Despite their neglect by researchers relative to other causes of death, motor vehicle and other accidents contribute substantially to sex differences in mortality and address theoretical debates over the consequences of gender equality. A reduction-in-protection hypothesis argues that gender equality reduces the female advantage in accident mortality, a reduction-in-inequality hypothesis argues that gender equality increases the advantage, and an institutional adjustment hypothesis argues that gender equality initially reduces and then increases the advantage. The analysis tests these hypotheses using data on age-specific male and female accident mortality rates and indicators of work and family status for 18 high income nations from 1955–1994.In support of the institutional adjustment hypothesis, declining differentials in male and female motor vehicle and other accident mortality rates level off and sometimes increase in recent years, and measures of work and family change generally have similar curvilinear influences on the differential. Across nations, gender equality speeds the reversal in the differential for motor vehicle accidents, but not for other accidents.     

Social indicators of basic needs: Quantitative data for human rights policy

This paper reports on the author's effort to improve the consistency and objectivity of the economic rights section of the annual Country Reports, prepared by the Department of State, to provide a basis for equitable implementation of this aspect of U.S. human rights policy. The purpose was to define relatively objectively the extent to which a country's basic human needs are filled, as a backdrop to a discussion of the country's policy effort. This complex and evolving area of foreign policy had few participants who were sophisticated about social policy or social data, and existing social indicators had many problems of reliability. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights to which the U.S. is signatory, were taken as starting points, along with literature on basic needs in developing countries. Education, health, income and nutrition were selected as the highest priority rights for immediate action, policy issues were outlined for discussion, and a set of overview, background, and diagnostic social indicators were selected for inclusion in the reports. Principles for the selection of indicators included simplicity, ready availability across many nations, reliability, credibility, comprehensibility and correspondence to policy issues. Indicators, which are available through the World Bank, included life expectancy, literacy rates, infant mortality, school enrollment, population per physician, percentage of FAO daily nutritional requirement, percentage served by clean water. Cautions are raised that indicators should be used only in context of expert qualitative analysis of a country's situation because they are imperfect and limited measures. They should not be linked to policy too directly because the causal connection may be tenuous. The project is seen as a first phase in improving the information used in this policy area and giving more visibility to the issues.     

An automatic-democratic approach to weight setting for the new human development index

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of constructing a multi-dimensional index is that of choosing weights for the components. This problem is often bypassed by adopting the ‘agnostic’ option of equal weights, as in the human development index. This is an annual ranking of countries produced by the United Nations Development Programme based on life expectancy, education, and per capita gross national income. These three dimensions are now aggregated multiplicatively. Whatever weights (exponents) are chosen for these dimensions, some nations will feel disadvantaged. To avoid the use of arbitrary weights, we propose for consideration a two-step approach: (1) find the most advantageous set of weights for each nation in turn, and (2) regress the associated optimal scores on the underlying indicators to find a single weight set. This approach has the properties of non-subjectivity, fairness, and convenience. The result is that the highest weight is placed on the life expectancy dimension.     

A value based index for measuring national quality of life

A new index of the quality of life (QOL) of nations was created. The measured variables are selected based on a universal set of human values derived from the work of Schwartz (1994). The Basic QOL Index, designed primarily to discriminate between developing countries, includes seven variables: purchasing power, homicide rate, fulfillment of basic physical needs, suicide rate, literacy rate, gross human rights violations, and deforestation. The Advanced QOL Index, designed primarily to assess QOL in highly industrialized nations, includes seven variables: physicians per capita, savings rate, per capita income, subjective well-being, percent attending college, income equality, and environmental treaties signed. Combining the two indices produced a reliable measure of QOL that systematically covers diverse human values. The nations scoring highest on the Combined QOL Index were Canada, Switzerland, Netherlands, U.S.A., and Norway, and those scoring lowest were Ethiopia and Rwanda.     

DETERMINANTS AND INDICATORS OF HEALTH AND WELL-BEING: TOOLS FOR EDUCATING SOCIETY

Over the last 50 years, industrial countries have seen dramatic increases in the health and well being of their citizens. Life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality, key measures of population health, have shown continuous improvements since the turn of the century. Yet changes in the economic and social fabric such as increasing income disparity, psychological stressors such as high unemployment levels, and health care reforms with reductions in service provisions that are currently being experienced in industrialized countries, are threatening the sustainability of human health and well-being. With government resources dwindling for health services, expectations are increasing for communities to take charge of their own health and well-being. This paper presents some of the issues and dilemmas surrounding the sustainability of human health, and identifies the importance of developing educated and mobilized communities. By highlighting examples from the Community Health and Well-being in Southwestern Ontario: A Resource for Planning report, it suggests that the provision of key local health and well-being indicators is an important first step to community education and mobilization.     

Human Well Being: A Decile Group Analysis on Indian Household Data

This is an attempt to measure human well being across different sections of the society in India over time where sections have been made in terms of ten decile groups of income. In this context, the extent to which rural sector is lagging behind the urban sector is another dimension of the study. The study uses grouped household data, collected and made available by National Sample Survey Organisation between 1987–1988 and 1999–2000. The inter decile group analysis does not show parity in the attainment levels of the individual indicators of human well being, although an overall systematic inter temporal betterment for each decile group is very clear. Rural–urban gaps in terms of attainment of these indicators is also not so small.

The McMansionization of America? Income stratification and the standard of living in housing, 1960–2000

Consumption patterns and living standards are relatively neglected in stratification research even though they are important indicators of material well-being. Consumption inequality is related to income and wealth disparities through complex processes not yet well understood. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing a striking shift in the standard of living in housing in the US that occurred at the same time as a substantial increase in income inequality. Houses became significantly bigger in the 1980s and 1990s just as inequalities deepened, reversing an earlier trend towards smaller houses. Diverse theoretical traditions in the consumption and housing stratification literatures explain this shift differently, and in particular posit very different effects of rising income inequality. I derive several alternative expectations from these traditions: two predicting that the increasing size of houses was broadly shared across income levels, while another expects it represented increasing divergence in living standards, paralleling the trend in income inequality. I use US Census and American Housing Survey data and several different methods to adjudicate between these theories. The results provide some support for each of the alternative expectations, but the most significant finding is that big house ownership became more concentrated among the affluent. A focus on living standards thus uncovers a key source of rising disparities at the turn of the 21st century with important implications for wealth stratification too since houses are the major debt and asset held by most Americans.     

On ‘Consistent’ Poverty

The measurement of poverty as ‘consistent’ poverty offers a solution to one of the primary problems of poverty measurement within Social Policy of the last three decades. Often treated as if they were synonymous, ‘indirect’ measures of poverty, such as low income measures, and ‘direct’ measures, such as indices of material deprivation, identify surprisingly different people as being poor. In response to this mismatch, a team of Irish researchers put forward a measure which identified respondents in as being in poverty when they experienced both a low standard of living, as measured by deprivation indicators, and a lack of resources, as measured by a low income line. Importantly, they argued that the two measures required an equal weight. In this paper, I present a reconsideration of the consistent poverty measure from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. In particular, I examine the claim that low income and material deprivation measures should be given an ‘equal weight’. I argue that, from a conceptual perspective, the nature of the indicators at hand means that a deprivation-led measurement approach might be understood to align with the definition of poverty which Nolan and Whelan outline and, from an empirical perspective, that it is the material deprivation measure—and not the low income measure—which is particularly effective in identifying individuals at risk of multiple forms of deprivation. However, I argue that greater attention needs to be given to the question of whether indicators of material deprivation provide a sufficient measure of material poverty and suggest that advancing the measurement of material deprivation beyond its relatively rudimentary state represents an important priority for poverty research.     

Well-Being <Emphasis Type="Italic">in</Emphasis> Nations and Well-Being <Emphasis Type="Italic">of</Emphasis> Nations

Human societies cannot exist without human beings and human beings cannot exist without a society. Still there can be a conflict of interest between the individual and society and there are historical examples of societies prospering at the cost of its members, and examples of people thriving at the cost of society. The degree of conflict or synergy will vary over time. This begs the question: How it is today? To what extend does the well-being of contemporary nations go together with the well-being of their inhabitants? In a system theoretical perspective one can distinguish four kinds of being ‘well’: (1) good external conditions, (2) appropriate internal functioning, (3) positive external effects and (4) system maintenance. At the level of nations these aspects of well-being cannot be meaningfully combined in one measure, hence each aspect is measured separately. At the level of individuals a fairly comprehensive measure is how long and happy people live. Data was available for 92 nations in the early 2000s. Analysis of these data shows much correspondence between the well-being of contemporary nations and average well-being of citizens in these nations. This appears in strong correlations between Happy Life Years and (a) the position of the nation in the world system, (b) the functioning of public institutions in the nation, (c) the productivity of the nation, and (d) the stability of the system. There are plausible explanations for this connection, one is that modern society fits human nature fairly well and another that happy citizens make a better society. So, there is no great conflict between the individual and society, at least not at this moment.     

Measurement of social development: an international comparison

PQLI and HDI are the two most popular measures of development, besides per capita income. Over the years, PQLI appears to be not much in use for regional comparisons, especially after the introduction of HDI. While PQLI considers only the physical variables—adult literacy, life expectancy at birth and infant survival rate, HDI has life expectancy at birth, educational attainment and real GDP per capita (PPP$). PQLI and HDI are similar, the main difference between the two being the inclusion of income in HDI and exclusion of the same from PQLI. In a sense, HDI represents both physical and financial attributes of development and PQLI has only the physical aspects of life. The present author took the lines of PQLI to express development in terms of physical variables and considering development as a multidimensional phenomenon, Ray (1989) [Ray, A. K. (1989). On the measurement of certain aspects of social development, Social Indicators Research (Vol. 21, pp. 35–92). The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.] included as many as 13 physical variables to represent social development across 40 countries; no financial variable was included in the construction of composite index, termed as the Social Development Index, SDI. Incidentally, like PQLI, SDI was introduced before HDI. Unlike PQLI and HDI, SDI considers (i) a large number of indicators representing various concern areas and (ii) a set of objective methods for combining the development indicators as a composite index. Ray (1989) has been restated and updated in this article with newer cross-country information. In the present study, SDI has been constructed for over 102 countries, including 21 OECD countries, using 10 development indicators, instead of 13 indicators in the past. Apart from presenting objective methods for combining indicators into SDI, the present study asserts that SDI works better than HDI as a measure of development for an international comparison. The views expressed in the article are those of the author and not of the institution he serves.     

Junior partners: Women's contribution to family income in Canada

This research examines the degree of financial contribution of married women to their overall family income. This phenomenon is analyzed from the point of view of sex-role/human capital orientations. The sex-role position argues that regardless of women's social, economic and education background their financial input to household economy will always be less than fifty percent because women's financial opportunities are impeded by sex-role configurations and expectations. The human capital thesis explains women's apparent inability to contribute more than half of the family income as a function of their lower human capital; that is, education, professionalization and training in the labour market. Individual data pertaining to thirty-year old married women, taken from the 1981 Canadian census, are examined. Generally, we find support for the positions: Women with relatively high human capital assmulation contribute significantly to overall household income, but invariably that contribution is less than 50 percent of total family income. On average, all women contribute 22 percent of their families annual income, while working women provide approximately 33 percent of the total. This analysis demonstrates what appears to be a pervasive phenomenon in industrial nations: married women are generally junior economic partners within the family. The extent of junior partnerships, however, is somewhat conditioned by women's human capital resources.     

Investigation on birth desires of couples of childbearing age in Hongsheng and three other villages conforming to consideration conditions for the second birth]

The opinions of inhabitants of outlying rural areas regarding second births are explored in this report. By means of household interviews, it is revealed that 22 households out of 153 (i.e., 14.4%) that are eligible for a second birth usually do not opt for the second birth. In a study that took place in four villages within one county, findings showed that desire for a second birth is determined in large part by the sex of the firstborn, males being preferred to females. Moreover, this desire decreases in proportion to time in that the elegible married couple often realizes the economic benefit of having only one child after the first child's birth and chooses not to have a second one. Similarly, many low-income couples would like to have a second child but find that it is not within their economic means. Mid-range income couples often want a second child as well. However, it is generally the couples with higher income that choose to remain with only one child. The desire for a male child is quite strong in the People's Republic of China, especially in rural areas. The fact that the male carries on the family name is very important in most people's opinion, as is the fact that a son has the potential to increase the family's income through manual labor. Thus, the inhabitants of rural areas traditionally favor male children.