I’d like to discuss some of the ways researchers try to measure quality of life or well-being and the difficulties with such mea

In this part of the test, you will hear a short talk. You will hear the talk only once. While listening to the talk , you may take notes on the important points so that you have enough information to complete a gap-filling task. Then write your answer in the corresponding space on your Answer Sheet. You will not get your Test Book until after you have listened to the talk.
   Good morning. What I’d like to do in this short talk is to discuss some of the ways researchers try to measure quality of life or well-being and the difficulties with such measures. Of course the perception of high or low quality of life is subjective and may differ from individual to individual.
   Traditionally, economists have used levels of standard of living as indicators of quality of life among countries or within countries. For most of the 20th century the only measurement used to compare the standards of living of citizens of different countries was national income—this was often criticised for various reasons, the main one being that standard of living should not be analysed only in terms of economic growth. In the second half of the 20th century economists and other social scientists started to develop indices which included social as well as economic indicators. The aim of these indices was to give a more holistic picture of the living conditions of different populations.
   The best-known of these indices is the United Nations Human Development Index , or HDI, which was first published in 1990 . And I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about this particular index. The HDI is described in the UN Human Development Report for 2002 as a "simple summary measure of three dimensions of the human development concepts: living a long and healthy life, being educated and having a decent standard of living". So there are three parts to this particular index: long and healthy life, education and standard of living. Now the concept of living a long and healthy life is captured by life expectancy at birth. Although life expectancy does measure length of life it doesn’t necessarily reflect health status: in other words it isn’t always true that individuals who live longer are also healthy, in particular in the last years of life.
   Educational attainments is measured in the HDI by two indicators: by adult literacy rates i. e. , the proportion of people aged at least 15 years old who can read and write a short simple statement on their everyday life and also by the ratio of combined enrolments in primary, secondary and tertiary education.
   The final element in the HDI is standard of living and that is measured in terms of Gross Domestic Product per capita i. e. , GDP divided by the total population.
   It is widely recognised that measuring only those three dimensions leaves out other very important aspects of human development. And one of the criticisms of the UN index is that the number of factors included is too limited. There are some other difficulties with the index, um, I don’t have time to discuss them all, but I will briefly mention some of them. Firstly there is the problem of what the index is actually measuring. For example, poverty is obviously a major contributor to poor quality of life, but the devastating consequences of absolute poverty are not transparent in measures like GDP per capita. Neither is the extent of income inequalities. Another important exclusion is the net effect of economic growth on the environment and its impact on quality of life. Secondly there is the issue of the quality and quantity of the information collected. The same methodology for data collection is not strictly applied in all countries, and the gaps in the tables used for the calculation of the index show that some components of the index are actually based on guesstimates. A third question we should ask is how well the Western concepts used in social well-being indices reflect the way that individuals in non-Western cultures perceive their quality of life. This can be illustrated by a discussion in Schumacher’s book Small Is Beautiful, when he compared modern economics by which he meant Western economics and Buddhist economics. He argued that Western economics measures standard of living by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a person who consumes more is better off than another who consumes less. On the other hand a Buddhist economist would see this as irrational. Since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. Therefore, higher GDP per capita would not be a meaningful indicator of greater human development in Buddhist economics.