How should we measure ‘well-being’?
One of my intellectual interests relates to how evaluation and social indicators can focus our collective attention on the problems that need to be addressed, setting better benchmarks toward which we should aspire.
And one of my great passions is around reducing political, economic, and social inequality, to build toward a more just future.
And, here, these two worlds align.
Because we need some better measures of how we’re doing.
I don’t mean the U.S. poverty line, although clearly that needs to be revamped.
But, here, I’m thinking more of the underlying issue, not poverty but what creates the conditions for it.
We need a better measure than Gross Domestic Product per capita, because, clearly, an increase in GDP doesn’t always translate to an increase in well-being.
Look at how much more we spend on incarceration today, which is tied to an increase in GDP, when it’s clear that people aren’t benefiting from that particular outlay.
We have the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, although, perhaps not surprisingly, it doesn’t hold much cachet with policymakers or even pundits in the U.S.
Something like the 20/20 ratio, which compares how well the bottom 20% are doing, compared to the top 20%, would be even more helpful, I think.
Or the Hoover index, which calculates how much redistribution would be needed to achieve total equality.
I’m certainly no economist–or mathematician–but an indicator that could clearly indicate a person’s likelihood of leaving poverty, or leaving the bottom 20% or so, could, if inserted into our understanding about our economic system, help to crack the myth of ‘rags to riches’.
So why do we use GDP per capita, when it so clearly fails to capture so much of what we really need to know, and distorts so much of the picture?
There are better measures out there, and we certainly have the technical capacity to shift to them, or even to develop something else, if we really wanted.
I can only conclude that our stubborn clinging to something woefully inadequate has much to do with how we come out looking relatively good according to that measure, and pretty blatantly unequal according to others.
If we’re not winning, after all, we can always move the goalposts.
But I think that, while metrics are surely not everything, having better measures would really help.
You manage to what you measure, after all, and, if we had some consensus about what we were working toward, we’d at least have a shot at getting there.
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A better measure for a better system
How should we measure ‘well-being’?
One of my intellectual interests relates to how evaluation and social indicators can focus our collective attention on the problems that need to be addressed, setting better benchmarks toward which we should aspire.
And one of my great passions is around reducing political, economic, and social inequality, to build toward a more just future.
And, here, these two worlds align.
Because we need some better measures of how we’re doing.
I don’t mean the U.S. poverty line, although clearly that needs to be revamped.
But, here, I’m thinking more of the underlying issue, not poverty but what creates the conditions for it.
We need a better measure than Gross Domestic Product per capita, because, clearly, an increase in GDP doesn’t always translate to an increase in well-being.
Look at how much more we spend on incarceration today, which is tied to an increase in GDP, when it’s clear that people aren’t benefiting from that particular outlay.
We have the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, although, perhaps not surprisingly, it doesn’t hold much cachet with policymakers or even pundits in the U.S.
Something like the 20/20 ratio, which compares how well the bottom 20% are doing, compared to the top 20%, would be even more helpful, I think.
Or the Hoover index, which calculates how much redistribution would be needed to achieve total equality.
I’m certainly no economist–or mathematician–but an indicator that could clearly indicate a person’s likelihood of leaving poverty, or leaving the bottom 20% or so, could, if inserted into our understanding about our economic system, help to crack the myth of ‘rags to riches’.
So why do we use GDP per capita, when it so clearly fails to capture so much of what we really need to know, and distorts so much of the picture?
There are better measures out there, and we certainly have the technical capacity to shift to them, or even to develop something else, if we really wanted.
I can only conclude that our stubborn clinging to something woefully inadequate has much to do with how we come out looking relatively good according to that measure, and pretty blatantly unequal according to others.
If we’re not winning, after all, we can always move the goalposts.
But I think that, while metrics are surely not everything, having better measures would really help.
You manage to what you measure, after all, and, if we had some consensus about what we were working toward, we’d at least have a shot at getting there.
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