ABSTRACT
The United Nations Development Program in 1990 released a report ranking 130 countries according to a new human development index. Like the physical quality of life index, the index uses a combination of criteria to measure the quality of people's lives. It also measures inequalities within countries as well as between classes, regions, rural and urban areas, age groups, and sexes. Problems encountered in assessing causes, levels, or consequences of "modernization" have arisen from the general fuzziness of the concept or at least the lack of consensus among users as to its meaning. The supposedly modern United States continues to rank very high in indices of religious belief and church attendance. The concept of empowerment, which gained popularity in the 1980s, particularly among village-level practitioners, applies primarily to a strategy rather than to a theoretical model. The empowerment approach, running counter to the interests of political and economic elites, was not likely to be pursued by many governments.
