The Age of Sustainable Development" gives students an understanding of the key challenges and pathways to sustainable development - that is, economic development that is also socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable.
Measuring Wellbeing
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The Age of Sustainable Development
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Inequality Around the World
Professor Sachs delves into the reasons for and the measurements of inequality between and within countries.
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Jeffrey Sachs
Director, Earth Institute; Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development; Professor of Health Policy and Management
[MUSIC]
We're interested in quality of life.
Part of that, of course, is the level of income.
Can people feed themselves?
Can they afford healthcare?
Can they afford basic amenities?
But we know that there's more to life than bread alone.
We know that material possessions aren't everything.
We know that simple measures like the income per person only give us
a rough reflection of the overall level of well-being of an individual or a nation.
And since in sustainable development what we're really interested in is not
raising market income per se, we're really interested in raising human well-being.
It's important for us to ask, then, how can we measure well-being?
I have used, so far, the shorthand of the gross domestic product per person.
Because it's not a terrible indicator, it gives us some relevant information.
It is not only related to income, and not only related
to the absence of poverty when that income per person is high enough, but
it also is related to other things that we know we care about,
education levels, health and opportunities in life.
But of course, we can do better than using one simple indicator of human well-being.
And we know that whatever indicator we use, we can't just rely on averages.
We have to look at the variation within a society or
across societies as well as the average numbers that we're using.
So what are some of the options of measuring human well-being that go beyond
the simple calculation of the gross domestic product per person?
One important innovation [COUGH] championed by
the United Nations Development Program during the last quarter century,
is the Human Development Index.
It tries to give a more holistic account of human development to take into
account the things which empower people, which help them meet their capacities.
And it does that by looking at income per person as just one of
the three basic dimensions of well-being.
Adding in indicators of educational attainment, whether it's literacy or
enrollment rates, together with measures of health,
typically looking at life expectancy at birth.
And by taking a kind of weighted average a part due to income, a part due to
education and a part due to health,
the United Nations Development Program has created and now tracked for
a quarter century, an overall index of human development or
HDI, and we've learned a lot from that.
If you look at the HDI or the Human Development Index,
you can see that it looks similar to the map
of gross domestic product per person but, it's by no means the same.
There are countries that are relatively low on income per capita and
do quite well on the Human Development Index because they have good
indications of life expectancy and educational attainment.
There are on the other hand many countries that rank very high in income per capita
but do not have good outcomes when it comes to health and education.
Let's take a look at some examples of countries that are rather
rich in terms of their gross domestic product per capita but
rather poor on their human development indicators.
Equatorial Guinea is such a case.
Equatorial Guinea was a completely impoverished country in West Africa
until a few years ago when it struck it rich with oil and gas discoveries.
That's potentially good if those oil and gas earnings are used wisely and
invested in raising overall well-being.
But there's a lag and there is a question of
the quality of governance to accomplish that.
As it stands today, Equatorial Guinea ranks rather high on income per person.
It's 32nd in the world in income per person, but
it ranks 136th in the Human Development Index,
meaning that its education and health outcomes are still pretty miserable.
It has not yet turned its oil and
gas earnings into real benefits broadly for the society.
Another example, similar, Angola.
Angola is a country in Southwest Africa,
also a major hydrocarbons economy.
Also, with the opportunity to take those earnings of oil and gas,
and convert them into broad-based improvements of living conditions.
But, there has been a serious gap and a lot of corruption along the way.
So that Angola ranks than the middle of the pack, 88 in the gross domestic
product per capita but a 148th in the Human Development Index.
So you see, that the Human Development Index adds
a lot of useful information for us by giving us a broader-based
snapshot than taking the gross domestic product per person alone.
If you flip it around and ask about countries that are ranking
higher on their human development than on their income per capita,
the reverse of the phenomenon that we just saw on Equatorial Guinea and Angola.
You could look to a country like Sri Lanka,
which traditionally, even though it's had a lot of violence and upheaval,
has had relatively high social indicators of health and
education even at a relatively low level of domestic product per person.
Another country quite developed at this point,
a high level of gross domestic product per person but
even a higher human development outcome is South Korea.
South Korea is an amazing country.
It's had a huge success in economic growth, meaning that the GDP per
person has soared over the last half-century.
It's become one of the richest countries in the world.
But part of that has been an incredible focus on raising education standards and
on the health of the population.
So that as high as South Korea now ranks in
the GDP per capita, roughly around 30th in the world,
its ranking in human development is near the top of the world's charts,
roughly around the 12th position in HDI.
So this has been a quite useful expansion
of our ability to assess and categorize countries.
Because just as the World Bank categorizes countries as high income, middle income,
and low income, the United Nations has categorized countries as high human
development, medium human development, and low levels of human development.
But there's another absolutely fascinating way that we can
attempt to access well-being.
And, you think about it for a moment and you say, hey, why not?
And that is, ask people.
Ask people about the quality of their lives.
Are they satisfied with their lives?
How would they rate their lives in terms of a ladder
where the top rung of that ladder would be full satisfaction,
the bottom rung of the ladder is feeling pretty glum.
And asking people where they stand on that ladder of life, say,
between the lowest rung at zero and the highest rung at ten.
In recent years, there has been a huge, absolutely fascinating,
effort to assess well-being in that straightforward way.
Asking people, are you happy, in essence.
And it's important to note that psychologists and
scholars of happiness have found two quite distinct dimensions of happiness and
two quite different kinds of questions to elicit that.
One is to ask emotionally, did you have a good day yesterday, were you happy?
Positive emotions and that's sometimes called emotional or affective happiness.
And the other is to ask people quite different kind of question.
How do you evaluate your life, are you satisfied with your life?
Where would you put yourself on the ladder of life?
That's called evaluative happiness.
Your evaluating life.
And that's the kind that I think we should look at to try to understand where
countries and individuals feel they are in the path of broader economic development.
We have a map, we can look at the distribution
of reported happiness in that evaluative sense,
in the sense of life satisfaction around the world.
One thing you do notice, richer countries tend to be happier.
But that's not all there is to happiness.
There are countries that are middle income countries, close to the top of the charts.
There are richer countries at the top of the league in
GDP per capita but not so happy.
And we learn a lot from this.
Looking at this, I'm happy to say that the America's,
that's my part of the world, that's a pretty happy part of the world.
You can see it in the maps.
Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand rank very high on happiness.
Some of the poorer regions, perhaps, not surprisingly, rank much lower.
What do we learn when we study the differences
of happiness in this evaluation sense around the world?
We find out that income per person or GDP per capita matters,
but it doesn't matter all that much.
We have to keep focus that it's just one aspect of happiness.
A second major reason for happiness or unhappiness is
the quality of what we call social capital, social connections.
Do people have good networks of friends and colleagues?
Do they trust others in their community?
Do they trust their government to be honest or is their government corrupt?
That's a huge determinant of whether people report their lives to be of
high satisfaction or not.
Their own health, physical health and mental health,
of course plays a very important role.
And what I find absolutely fascinating and important,
a theme that I want us to reflect on as we think about sustainable
development is that an individual's values,
things that an individual holds to be important are shown to be
strongly related to whether that individual is happy or not.
Interestingly, the people who report a very strong fixation on getting rich and
very materialistic values, turn out to be a bit more frustrated.
They don't report as much satisfaction in life.
People who report that generosity is very important to them, volunteering, giving,
a sense of altruism, contributing to the community, are also values that are shown
repeatedly in many studies to be related to a higher level of life satisfaction.
This is quite important for us as we think about sustainable development.
If we simply pursue income per capita just raise that gross domestic
product per capita no matter what, we're going to lose it on many counts.
Societies will become highly unequal.
The physical environment will come under great threat.
But also people will not necessarily achieve the kind of happiness and
life satisfaction that they want.
If we take a more balanced and
holistic approach as sustainable development bids us to do.
Paying attention to higher income per person.
But also focusing on healthy societies, social inclusion,
honest government, networks of social support.
And if we promote values of generosity, of compassion,
of volunteerism, rather than values of strong materialism,
of just trying to get rich, that also can help people to become happy.
In the end, our goal is satisfaction with life.
It is human well-being, we need to take a rich and varied perspective.
Fortunately, we have more and more tools to be able to measure,
assess and ultimately to help to promote improvements of human
well-being in this deeper and more inclusive sense.
[MUSIC]
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