Assignment:
Measuring Development: Alternate Assignment to Practicing Poverty
Students unable to undertake the Practicing Poverty assignment have the alternative of writing a 6-8 page essay (double-spaced) on attempts to measure quality of life. If policy makers want to be able to track progress in making people's lives better, they need to figure out a way to measure quality of life. Not surprisingly, this has been surprisingly hard to do, not only because of challenges of gathering good data, but because the very categories meant to indicate quality of life are controversial.
Read the following texts:
•Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: A User's Guide: Chapter 6: How Many Do You Want It To Be?
•The United Nations Development Progamme's summary of the Human Development Index, https://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi
•Jeffrey Sach's Introduction to The World Happiness Report, edited by John Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs https://www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writing/2012/World%20Happiness%20Report.pdf
The goal of this essay is to defend a metric (a way of measuring) quality of life. Your essay should have the following structure:
1) Introductory paragraph summarizing the view you intend to defend
2) A critical discussion each of the three metrics: GDP per capita, the Human Development Index, and Happiness
3) A defense of your chosen metric drawing on your discussion
4) A conclusion summarizing your findings
For this essay, you should include discussion of the following questions.
1) What is GDP per capita?
2) What are some of the drawbacks of measuring wellbeing in a country using GDP per capita?
3) In what respects is the Human Development Index an improvement on GDP per capita as a measure?
4) What shortcomings do you see with the Human Development Index?
5) Can happiness be measured? How do researchers typically try to measure it?
6) What are some of the drawbacks of measuring happiness?