david.curran@... (David Curran) writes:
>Bhutan is trying to define national welfare
>http://www.physorg.com/news125462439.html
>
>"The main concerns have been identified as psychological well-being, health,
>education, good governance, living standards, community vitality and
>ecological diversity."
>
>What concerns would you include? And how would these parts of GDP+ be
>measured?

Life expectancy provides a fairly objective measure that is rather highly
correlated with the concerns that I care about. Some care needs to be taken
to standardize the somewhat variable treatment of infants that die shortly
after birth versus those that aren't counted because they're considered
stillborn, and there's some risk of patients being kept alive when the
patient would rather die, but those affect a pretty small fraction of
political issues.
I would like to include some measure of psychological well-being, but any
of the measures that come to mind would be abused if they influenced
important decisions.
I think education, good governance, and possibly more of that list should
be thought of as means we use to increase welfare, not ends.

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Peter McCluskey | When someone is honestly 55% right, that's very good
www.bayesianinvestor.com| Whoever says he's 100% right is a fanatic