Social Indicators Flashcards
How do we measure the wellbeing of a country?
Measuring the degree to which a country actively participates in the globalized world
Three major areas for consideration:
1) Economic Development – a country’s material wealth and trade, which is determined by its GDP/capita, ratios of cars to people, and per capita electrical power capacity for example;
2) Social Development – level of education, healthcare, life expectancy, and rate of infant mortality;
3) Political Maturity – measured by considering factors such as whether a country is democratic, has a low level of corruption, a functioning and established electoral system and rule of law.
What is HDI?
Human Development Index - explores health (life expectancy) wealth (GDP) and education (expected years of schooling)
What is life expectancy and how does it shorten?
The average lifespan a new born can expect, it shortens when child deaths are common
What is Gini Coefficient?
Distribution of family income - Gini index measures degree of inequality in the distribution of income in a country.
The more equal a country’s income distribution, the lower its Gini index, e.g., a Scandinavian country with an index of 25.
The more unequal a country’s income distribution, the higher its Gini index, e.g., a Sub-Saharan country with an index of 50.
If income were distributed with perfect equality the index would be zero; if income were distributed with perfect inequality, the index would be 100.
What is the quintile ratio?
Ratio of the average income of the richest 20% of the population to the average income of the poorest 20% of the population
What is inequality?
The difference in income within a country NOT between countries
Gender inequality?
Dimensions:
1) Health (maternal mortality, adolescent birth rate)
2) Empowerment (female and male population at least secondary education, female and male shares of parliamentary seats)
3) Labour market (Female and male labour force participation rates)
What are demographic indicators?
Crude Birth Rate: the total number of live births in a year for every 1000 people alive in the society
Crude Death Rate: the total number of deaths in a year for every 1000 people alive in the society
Dependency ratio: proportion of the population that are dependents (under 15 or over 65). It is calculated
by dividing the number of dependents by the total population (15-64).
Natural Increase Rate: The percentage of growth in a population. It is measured by subtracting the crude death rate from the crude birth rate.
What doesn’t GDP measure?
measures everything, overtime it always goes up (especially during war, causing business to boom), it goes up even during negative times and doesn’t measure things about the quality of our life.
Affective VS Evaluative Wellbeing
Affective Wellbeing: Are you happy?
Evaluative Wellbeing - Are you living a good life?
What is the Cantorial Ladder?
Bottom step is worst possible life, the top long is the best possible life
→ Ask what level you are at right now? In five years?
Ask thousands of people to get a good idea of happiness. Connect to social trust, support, government corruption.
How can you measure wealth inequality?
Gini, quintile ratio, look at top 1%
What is Happy planet?
Looking at HDI, eco footprint and divide by population. So how much resources are being used to create HDI –> are we being efficient?
What is the correlation of money and happiness?
Countries that are lesser developed are unhappy because they are poor as it can make life extremely difficult. Once you reach around 60-80K income, wealth does not create greater happiness.
