Quality of Life Indicators
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Although many Americans hold these as sacred values, until recently, there has not been a systematic means of measuring whether the pursuit of happiness is largely successful or unsuccessful. However, beginning in the 1970s, a number of tools were developed to attempt to measure one's quality of life.
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Traditional Economic Indicators
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Traditional indicators have usually focused on economic factors such as consumer spending and production measures. Although these factors may indicate the economic health of a region or society, they do not present a full picture of the well- being of the people involved. For example, many affluent regions are plagued by drug use and other problems.
On the other hand, the small country of Bhutan, until recently practically isolated from the outside world, measures success in terms of Gross National Happiness. Although many of its residents live at subsistence level, there is significant evidence to suggest its residents may be among the happiest on earth.
Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators
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The Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators were developed as an attempt to comprehensively measure national level well-being. Although traditional economic indicators are included, other factors, such as social and environmental quality of life are also significant. The dimensions included in the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators are: shelter, recreation, public safety, national security, infrastructure, income, human rights, health, environment, energy, employment and education.
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Genuine Progress Indicator
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The Genuine Progress Indicator is the outgrowth of an article in "The Atlantic Monthly" by Clifford Cobb, Tad Halstead and Jonathan Rowe titled "If the Economy is Up, Why Is America Down?" The article declared that the traditional measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) were both incomplete and flawed. The authors proposed an alternative measure, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which counts the GDP as the nation's expenses and factors in sectors usually excluded, such as housework and volunteering, then subtracts social ills such as crime, loss of leisure time and natural resource depletion.
Sustainability Indicators
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In 1992, a group of 100 Seattle residents formed the Sustainable Seattle Civic Panel, which developed a list of 99 sustainability indicators to determine whether the area was becoming more or less environmentally sustainable, in addition to measuring general well-being. These indicators included such factors as number of wild salmon runs, the number of work hours at median income levels required to meet basic needs and the level of voter participation in primary elections.
Considerations
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In the economic downturn that began in the late 2000s, much attention has been refocused on the economy. However, the move toward increased sustainability has not been completely pushed aside. In fact, there is growing belief that the two sectors are not only not mutually exclusive but are in fact intertwined. Van Jones, for instance, in his book "The Green Collar Economy," advocates a reorientation toward "green jobs" to address the twin problems of social injustice and poverty.
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