Quality of Life Indexes
- Arguably, one of the most widely valued social indicators is happiness. Social researchers often use the term quality of life (QOL) to describe what is commonly called “happiness.” One of the leading pioneers of happiness research is Dr. Ruut Veenhoven Happy Life Years#References, emeritus-professor of 'social conditions for human happiness' at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He is also one of the chief critics of one of the most widely used QOL indexes, the Human Development Index (HDI) published by the United Nations Development Programme(UNDP). His 1996 paper “Happy Life-Expectancy, A Comprehensive Measure of Quality-of Life in Nations”, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research, proposed an alternative QOL index, called ‘happy life expectancy,’ (HLE). HLE may be a better indicator of happiness as it relies on subjective measures of happiness, as opposed to the largely materialistic measures that go into creating the HDI.
Read more about this topic: Happy Life Expectancy
Famous quotes containing the words quality of, quality, life and/or indexes:
“No taste is so acquired as that for someone else’s quality of mind.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth ... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Parents vary in their sense of what would be suitable repayment for creating, sustaining, and tolerating you all those years, and what circumstances would be drastic enough for presenting the voucher. Obviously there is no repayment that would be sufficient . . . but the effort to call in the debt of life is too outrageous to be treated as anything other than a joke.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)