Happy Planet Index

TED Talk with statistician Nic Marks, who asks why we measure a nation's success by its productivity — instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. Nic presents Happy Planet Index. The index is indeed very simple — it takes people's self-assessment of well-being, life expectancy and divides by environmental footprint. That's all. Next you could calculate index for countries, for group of countries, construct time series... However, the more important than index itself are ideas behind it:

• We do not have a dream, we have nightmares and fear of future. Regular debates about natural resource depletion in particular and a terrible future in general paralyze us, and prevent us acting. (By the way, I do not recall a single movie over the last 15-20 years, which depict future in bright colors. Terminator, The Matrix, 2012, all of them are anti-utopia, about dark and terrible future).
• Our development indicators «measure everything except that it gives life meaning». We calculate the volume of production, GDP and other figures that have little to do with the desires of the people. Moreover, we (both the Government and the private sector) use these figures as a guide for the movement. No wonder we, as a society, get to a completely different point, from where we want to get.
• Good news — some can achieve a good life without destroying the planet. Example: Costa Rica. The average life expectancy is 78.5 years there. According to surveys of the Gallup Institute, residents of Costa Rica are the happiest people of the planet. They live on a quarter of the resources that are commonly used in the western world. 99% of their electricity comes from renewable energy sources.
• The effectiveness of achieving quality of life falls — in recent years the quality of life has improved slightly, but the resources we use to achieve it increased radically. If we want to improve  well-being (or at least to maintain the level achieved), we have no other option but to increase the efficiency.

 

TED Talk, including full transcript.
Report «The Happy Planet Index: 2012 Report. A global index of sustainable well-being»



This post is also available in Russian.

I like the environment so much! (Please, don’t ask me to pay for it)

Every morning I open my Facebook news feed and between kitty kitty photos I usually see some pictures attracting my attention to ecological issues, degradation of environment, or articles calling me to ‘go green’. The same situation is in my email box. It seems that global ecological issues caught global attention. The question is what can we do with them?


There are long-standing debates about ‘environmental Kuznets curve’, which suggest inverted U-shaped relationship between development and environment—environmental degradation tends to get worse as economy grows, until some income level is reached and the trend is reverted, as countries start valuing clean environment and have money to invest in it. However, attempts to find environmental Kuznets curve in vivo did not bring conclusive results.


World Values Survey is a multinational poll, asking people about their values and attitudes toward different issues. Survey conducted in waves and we used most recent, 2005-2008 wave. Among other questions, it asked people what is more important for them—economic growth or protecting environment? People also responded if they are ready to give a part of their income for environment protection. We also complemented these perception data with GDP per capita numbers from WorldBank database.

First results were not surprising—the share of those who prefer protecting environment over economic growth had positive correlation with income level. In other words, the richer is a country, the more attention people tend to pay to environmental protection. (Of course, correlation does not imply causality). That the sort of things we expected. However, distribution seems to be rather ‘flat’ and, moreover, there is huge split among rich countries in their growth vs environment attitude. By the way, the picture is for more economically cheerful period of 2005-2008. With economic crisis hitting countries, especially developed ones, attention could gravitate from environmental protection toward economic growth.

However, if we plot desire to give part of income for environmental protection against income level, we will find negative correlations. In other words, the richer is a country, the less desire have people to pay for environmental protection. (Again, this is correlation, not causality.) This finding is quite striking for me. I could see two reasons for this. First, the majority of people in richer (or more developed) countries do not face immediate impact of environmental problems, due to higher urbanization and bigger share of industry and services in economy. In richer country ‘deforestation’ could mean lack of nice parks for a walk. In less developed country deforestation could mean lack of fuel to cook and products to maintain livelihood. Second, more developed countries typically have stronger governance and higher taxation, consequently expectations could be that the Government should sort out environment issues without additional contributions.

The picture gets even more intriguing if we look on preferring environment over economic growth and desire to pay for it—it seems that there is no correlation at all between them. In other words, people seem to like environment, however expect that someone else would pay for it.


Clicking ‘Like’ on yet another Save the Planet picture doesn’t make much sense. The big issue is how to include environmental concerns into a bigger economic picture and how to finance environment protection? On a personal level I switched to public transport, walking to work, and double side printing. What could we offer for societies at large?



This blog post is also available in Russian.
Original article at my site.

Indicators, Human Development and .. Shrek

Have you ever tried to explain indicators and human development to .. kids? How soon did they fall asleep? Explaining complex things, like human development measurement, in simple language is hard but very necessary. During Summer University Course on Sustainable Human Development in CEU, Budapest we paid specific attention to measurement issues. This year we experimented and called for ... Shrek story to explain indicators.


Slides are available on-line

Sustainable Human Development Index: What exactly we try to measure?

Twenty years ago Rio Summit raised global issues of ecological concerns and sustainability. This year Rio+20 conference will take an overview of past two decades and suggest program for the future we want.

One of the issues related to ecology and sustainability is measurement. This is not just a matter of curiosity, to establish «sustainable development goals» we should have good enough metrics and indicators of sustainable development (as someone nicely put it «You never have to be 'absolutely sure' of something. Being 'reasonably certain' is enough»). Unfortunately, until now we have no commonly agreed set of indicators or one «sustainable human development index», despite of many efforts in this area—WorldBank Adjusted Net Savings, Yale Environmental Sustainability Index, UNU Human Sustainable Development Index, just to mention few.

One principal issue in «sustainable development» measurement, in my mind, is conceptual non-clarity what exactly are measuring: development or sustainability? And what sustainability means? If we would like to have «sustainable [human] development index», it should take both—achieved level of development and ability to sustain achieved level. Looking to either of these aspects is not enough. One could get high on «development» scale, but it says nothing about possibility to go on with this achievements (resemble Greece current crisis, isn't it?). On the other hand, lower level of «development» could lay on more solid ground, which make it more sustainable.

Soon after Rio Summit Armenia start working on incorporation of sustainability aspects in Human Development Index. Resulting proposal with examples for two countries (Armenia and Georgia) was published in 1995. Proposed «Sustainable Human Development Index» adds fourth environmental component to three initial dimensions of human development, health, education, and living standards. Environmental component itself includes two sub-components—environmental state of a territory (4 indicators), and the environmental evaluation of human activities (7 indicators).

In the framework of Rio+20, Armenia is organizing side event to discuss possible options for Sustainable Development Index Methodology. We helped armenian team in structuring the approach to sustainable HDI in the light of recent development—changes in HDI index introduced in 2010, and extended approach to sustainability, which goes beyond ecological aspects only.

We started work with stepping back and asking a number of big questions:

• What is the purpose of the index: Global or National?
• What is the way of integrating the environmental aspects?
• What is approach to sustainability: narrow (environment only) or broad (in all areas)?
• What is the type of sustainability: weak (e.g. WorldBank Adjusted Net Savings) or strong (e.g. Ecological Footprint)?
• What are the links to other human development indexes and indicators?
• What is weighting procedure: for dimensions and indicators?
• How we do attribution of the ecological damage—by place of production or by consumption?

Without properly addressing these questions, one could risk to end up with strange figures in hands and unexpected interpretation of index. The resulting proposal for Sustainable Human Development Index answer all of them.

In design of Sustainable Human Development Index we decided to give priority to national relevance, while keeping in mind necessity for international (or at least regional) comparisons. We decided to take a broad approach to sustainability, looking on ability to sustain not only natural environment, but also economic and social ones. Fourth dimension was added to the Human Development Index, to incorporate state of environment, as we value «ability to live in clean and balanced natural environment», in the same way we value abilities to «live long and healthy life», «being educated and having access to knowledge», and «enjoying decent standards of living». Resulting Extended Human Development Index (EHDI) includes only indicators of status of natural environment in five areas: quality of water, quality of air, state of soils, state of biodiversity, and habitat. This index says us what we achieved, without saying how it was achieved.

To answer the question how it was achieved and if we could maintain achievements, we added separate tier to the index—sustainability. Indicators in this tier says about ability to sustain achieved level (i.e. do we have debt big enough to threat our current wealth?) in all four dimensions of human development (including natural environment). These indicators penalize or reduce achieved level—if you have extremely high water withdrawal level your currently nice environment will disappear, as it happened with the Aral Sea. Resulting index is Sustainable Human Development Index (SHDI), which should be judged against Extended Human Development Index (EHDI), looking how big is part of development (what we achieved), which is lost due to non-sustainability (how we achieved). The same approach is used, by the way, in Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), where HDI achievements (what) are penalized for inequalities (how).

«Yes, but...»—the question you will hear all the time you present some indicator or index. Indeed the broad picture of the world cannot be captured in one indicators or index, however perfect it could be. To put indexes in broader context, we included a broader set of «context» indicators—how much Government spend on education, health, environment? Do country have environmental protection institutions? What is the quality of education (as judged by PISA test results)? These things are very important, but are not hard enough to make their way into index.

Clearly, there are many questions to address to be 'reasonably certain' about the index. Trends in index, cross-country comparisons, approach to CO2 emission and energy efficiency of economies are just few of them.

This is a short outline of approach to sustainable human development measurement, which will be presented at Armenia side event at Rio+20 conference, alongside with calculations for a number of countries in Europe and Central Asia Region. I hope to see more developments in this area after the Rio+20 conference.

This article is also available in Russian.
Original article at my site.

Conference "Kvalita života v podmienkach globalizácie", 26-27 October 2011

Just got an invitation and programme of the conference «Measuring quality of life in conditionas of globalization», organized by the National Statistical Office of Slovakia.

Conference will take place 26-27 October in hotel Apollo, Bratislava. The Programme looks really interesting and appealing. It includes discussion of conceptual questions (first half of 26 October), as well as practical applications (second half of 26 October), and making use of existing statistical tools for these purposes (27 October).

I am going to present our work on Multidimensional Social Exclusion measurement, which we did in countries of region—Macedonia an Serbia on Balkans, Moldova and Ukraine in Western CIS, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan in Central Asia; and most recently in Armenia on Caucasus.

OECD Better Life Index

Numerous laces had been broken in debates how to measure «quality of life». The first problem we face, trying to measure the «quality» of our lives, is diversity and complexity of life. It is difficult to make and, moreover, to agree on a common list of areas and indicators in each area of quality of life. And it is even more difficult to squeeze all the diversity of life in one index, which is still necessary for any comparisons.

The second, less visible but more important issue-each of us differently value different aspects of life. For some, the incomes are of greatest value, while another pays more attention to decent work, and someone else put above all support from friends and family... Scientific, justified choice of «weights» for each area is a rather tricky task. The arbitrary choice of weight is in fact a political statement, to which occurs quite rarely. That is why most of the composite indices use equal weights for their dimensions-Human Development Index, Multidimensional Poverty Index, Multidimensional Social Exclusion Index. (Interestingly, in a recent paper, the authors obtained almost equal weights for the components of the Human Development Index , analyzing the data for the period 1975-2005)

OECD has found a very interesting approach to these issues in its «Better Life Index». First, they defined a list of areas from the «usual suspects» (housing, income, work safety, a total of 11 regions). Then they allowed users to decide on importance of each area (on a scale from 0 «not important» to 5 «very important»). Index itself is visualized for each of 34 countries in the form of a flower: petal size correspond to the each area, while the flower height-to composite index, taking into account the importances set by ​​the user.

Consideration of the quality of life is not limited to one composite index, you can see in detail how things look like in each area, such as support from the community. The most meticulous can reach up to full list of indicators and underlying data, used to calculate the index.

Ability to choose the importance of each area allows users to move away from the question «who is number 1?» and turn to more important question—how each of the 11 topics can contribute to overall well-being? Sure, we’ll see many more debates, «how to measure quality of life», but now everyone can do their research and take part in debates.


This post is also available in Russian

Human and Development: What we are talking about?

Two decades ago, in 1990, the first Global Human Development Report gave the birth to new concept of development—human development concept. English was main language of the report, as well as the working language for the most of authors. Translation of the concept in other languages, mostly Slavic ones, has faced difficulties. Mechanical translation of the term human development cannot translate the essence of the concept. It is important to avoid terminological misunderstanding, taking into account that during these two decades three terms appeared in Russian literature—«человеческое развитие», «развитие человеческого потенциала» and «развитие человека». This becoming especially relevant when one start thinking what are we measuring: development of society? personal development? process of development?

The most correct and most frequently used term is «человеческое развитие», which more correctly transfer the essence of the human development concept—type of development aimed on people, or, in other words “development of people, for people and by the people”. In the very first report Mahbub ul-Haq put it in the following way: “The objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. People are real wealth of nations.” Namely by its orientation on people this concept differs from other development concepts. Actually, exactly in this way, by using adjective to the word “development”, the term is translated into French (développement humain), Spanish (desarrollo humano), Romanian (dezvoltarea umană) Czech (lidský rozvoj) and many other languages. Namely in this form one could find in dictionaries. Namely by this term one could find in search engines articles, manuals and other materials. Namely in this way was entitled human development manual, produced by Moscow State University.

Expression «развитие человеческого потенциала» is linked with the roots of the human development concept, namely the “human capital” theory of Schultz, which appeared in 1960s. Formation of human capital included not only expenditures for education, but also research and development expenses, health care services, family planning. In other words, all investments in people were considered as productive ones, regardless the aim—either to increase gross national product, or to increase human capabilities. Still, people were treated as a resource for development, the aim of development per se was economic development, and the measure of development was GDP growth. Also, human capital concept did not take into account empowerment of people and their participation in the development process. This term is most frequently used in the national and regional Human Development Reports in Russian Federation and for translation of “human development index into Russian. If you google it out, you will get mostly economic articles and Human Development Reports for Russia and its regions.

«Развитие человека» is related to biology, psychology, and anthropology. It could be used in very broad philosophical sense as “humankind development”. If you look for this term in search engines, you will get papers from anthropology, biology, psychology, and philosophy, but not ones related to the human development concept.
To sum up, the most appropriate translation of the human development term in Russian is «человеческое развитие». It most adequately translate the essence of the concept and is most frequently used in Russian papers. In future one should stick to this term to avoid terminological confusions.

Related materials:
Andrey Ivanov. "Internalizing the human development paradigm: reflections of a witness"