ABSTRACT
Looking beyond economic performance leads to ultimate goals of happiness, wellbeing or the quality of life. Even if not intended to measure human wellbeing, gross domestic product is often blamed as a misleading indicator of wellbeing. Alternatively, happiness surveys obtain ad-hoc impressions of happiness or unhappiness at the moment the survey is taken, or ask about longer-term assessments of life satisfaction. The results of these surveys are based on emotions and cannot give a reliable picture of a nation’s quality of life or socioeconomic development. Results differ widely, except for the poorest nations in the sub-Saharan region of Africa where low income generates a low quality of life. This is hardly surprising and does not help designing policies of social progress. Mixing subjective indicators with more objective statistics in aggregate indices combines perceptions of wellbeing with conditions of health and wealth; the indices do not usually assess the connections or overlap of their indicators. Chapters 9 and 10 look therefore for quantifiable concepts of socioeconomic development and its sustainability.
