while I was sitting in class I began thinking of all the measures and indicators that can be used to chart develoopment. This came to my mind as we were talking about GDP and limits (if they exist) of economic growth. I got to thinking about what other measures (besides GDP, income, and other economic factors) exist to tell us how we're doing. Here's what I came up with:
GDP
Literacy
Infant Mortality
Obesity
Employment
Education Levels
Economic Freedom (like the index produced by James Gwartney and Robert Lawson)
Aids/Malaria Prevalence
Income Distribution (Gini coefficient)
Net Exports and Imports
Rate of Deforestation
Elections
Crime Rate
Property Rights
Population Growth
Obviously there are many others. The tricky thing is that while these indicators can tell us something, they can also give us horribly misleading information at the same time. The prevalence of Aids may decrease either because Aids is being erradicated (good) or because everyone who has it just died (bad). Election can be held, but that doesn't mean that the people's voices were heard. Population growth can decrease due to women gaining more control of their reproductive rights or because everyone is dying due to starvation. In the end, it's still a very difficult game. It takes long enough just to understand what you should be looking at. But even longer to learn how to analyze it
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Also, there are trade-offs. If you want an accurate picture of development, I think it should be subjective. That is, I think individuals have the best knowledge of whether or not their lives are getting better. It's not quantifiable, it would be really expensive, and self-reporting is unreliable.
ReplyDeleteThe point I wanted to make is this, though: any indicator is going to have problems. If you gather enough data to get a detailed picture of what's actually going on (what makes life good in Rio de Janeiro, and what makes it suck), then you lose the ability to compare across borders and the study gets absurdly expensive. For example, Crime in Rio may have a different effect on life in Rio than does crime in Detroit.
This relates to a point Jesse made in class: There's a disconnect between macro indicators and micro conditions.