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2.1 Quality of life indicators

One of the most widely known indicators of the quality of life is the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program (1998). The Human Development Index combines national indicators of income, life expectancy and education into a single number. First, a standard score is computed for each component indicator by country (where the standard score measures the difference between a country value and the maximum value divided by the range of values across countries). Next the standard component scores for each country are summed. This procedure results in a measure that allows countries to be ranked by the summary index and allows comparisons to be made across countries regarding quality of life.

In the United States, there is concern among social scientists that "more" does not unambiguously imply "better", that social costs may increase along with economic growth, and that economic measures alone provide a biased estimate of how well the people of the United States are doing. A number of indicators of social progress have been developed that adjust standard economic measures to account for social and environmental conditions. One such model is the Genuine Progress Indicator, which includes measures of such things as personal consumption, income distribution, value of housework and parenting, cost of crime, loss of old-growth forests, and loss of leisure time (Cobb and others 1995a,b). Values for the component indicators are summed up to produce a summary measure which is tracked over time to indicate trends.

In the private sector, the quality-of-life concept is used to rank the best places to live, work or do business based on multidimensional scales of well-being (for example see Boyer and Savageau 1981; Garoogian and others 1998; Morgan Quinto Corporation 1998). These indices use arbitrary methods for selecting and combining component indicators for wide-ranging measures of quality of life such as income, pollution, taxes, quality of public schools, number of women-owned businesses, and percent of adults who are binge drinkers.

Thus, we can see that summary measures of the quality of life are used to make comparisons, either across different places at a given point in time or over time for given locations (Dasgupta 1999). These data allow analysts to evaluate trends, anticipate future conditions of social well-being and determine how well certain locations are doing relative to other places. However, significant methodological issues remain regarding how to select component measures and the appropriate weights to be placed on components in creating a summary index. In this Chapter, we attempt to bypass some of these methodological problems by using an array of indicators that are not meant to be additive but rather provide a pluralistic view of the elements that reasonably enter into an assessment of forests and quality of life. A disaggregate approach, which focuses attention on a set of component indicators, is also used in assessments of the social health of the nation (for example, see Miringoff and Miringoff 1999).