MEASURING THE QUALITY OF LIFE
Guttman, Joel
The phrase "quality of life" seems to defy definition. As the battle cry of the ecology movement, it has acquired a multitude of connotations. Yet an attempt is underway not only to define...
...It is clearly not satisfactory to simply note the trade-offs involved and let an insulated decisionmaker choose the "optimal" rule...
...This dilemma, it should be emphasized, is of particular importance to anyone trying to en vision an alternative, socialist society...
...Who will decide which characteristics of the quality of life should be measured...
...Yet an attempt is underway not only to define but to measure the quality of life— an attempt that may greatly influence the direction of future government activity...
...Thus, it is claimed, social planning can avoid the biases of the "bargaining" approach...
...If the choice of qualityof-life characteristics were restricted to a particular government or academic elite, the quality-of-life index would only be a measure of that elite's quality of life...
...The benefit of clean air must be weighed not only against the cost of pollution-control devices but also against the cost of the increased unemployment resulting when higher costs force industries to employ fewer workers...
...Within the broad bounds set by Congress, the nation's priorities are cQntinually being ordered by the agencies of the executive branch...
...The problems inherent in any such index could only be multiplied if this were attempted...
...It should be emphasized that such an index would have meaning only with reference to a specific community and a specific proposed ac tion...
...Developing an index of the quality of life for the whole United States would involve av eraging out the quality of life of a suburbanite and a tenant in Harlem, of a farmer and a plumber, and so forth...
...When such separate characteristics as the distribution of income and water quality must be combined in a single index, what principle should be used to determine their relative importance...
...But if such an index were used as a criterion of government performance, it might provide an incentive for government officials to deceive the public...
...As the battle cry of the ecology movement, it has acquired a multitude of connotations...
...For even if the various consequences of a given action are fully measured, there is no known way of "objectively" measuring their relative importance...
...How does one put a price on the noise created by a new highway, or on the benefit of an added dollar spent on education, or on the "aesthetic cost" of a huge new dam...
...The government agencies, being under immediate pressure to justify their actions, are perhaps the most interested in "hard" data and quantification...
...It would be tempting to do so, if the alternatives to it were not as inadequate as they are...
...Thus a highway would be planned so that the impact of its noise on the affected communities' quality of life would be minimized, while simultaneously maximizing the time it would save for commuters...
...A lesser evil would be to devise an index that would combine the various effects into a single measure registering the "net" gain or "loss of a particular project...
...It is easy to say that the public ought to control certain economic relationships, but it is difficult to see how this can be done if the public cannot con trol its own government in the latter's day-to day—but emphatically untechnical—decisions...
...The whole range of government actions could conceivably be judged by this approach...
...THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY sponsored a conference in August 1972, at which this writer was a participant, entitled "The Quality of Life Concept—A Potential New Tool for Decision-makers...
...The index might not be as desirable as a referendum on each project, but the latter is clearly not feasible...
...The first, the interest-group bargaining approach, effectively eliminates the unorganized from the decisionmaking process...
...CONSIDERING THESE and other difficulties, should the whole idea of a quality-of-life index be abandoned...
...The pamphlet Toward a Social Report—written by a number of social scientists for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1969—is representative of this effort...
...Or should quality-of-life estimators claim, with Thoreau, that civilization has made it impossible for men and women to tell what is really important to themselves, and thus calculate the weights without regard to people's own stated preferences...
...Choosing a route for a new highway or mass-transit link, determining the entrance fee for a new national park, or choosing the size of a new public school are similarly much more than "technical" decisions...
...There are also practical questions that are no less important to those concerned with democracy and social justice...
...Should the quality of life, as a second possibility, be concerned only with objective conditions, such as the actual quality of the air or the actual level of public health...
...It would certainly be an improvement over the bargaining process, in which only the best-organized and wealthiest interest groups can influence the decision...
...When, for example, a new standard of air quality is formulated, a number of conflicting interests must be considered...
...The groups involved have widely varying motivations and thus differing conceptions of what ought to be involved in a quality-of-life index...
...Should the ratios of relative importance ("weights") always be the same as a community's preferences, as determined by a survey...
...But the problems these techniques are helping to solve are of particular concern to the socialist, who must develop ways for government to undertake an even broader range of projects than it undertakes at present...
...Such questions have led to the growth of the "socialindicator movement," which has encouraged the development of statistics purporting to measure such "intangibles...
...To omit such factors would be, to many, a refusal to face basic dimensions of any government decision...
...Such analyses, of course, are seldom purely objective and apolitical...
...But, clearly, political influence is not distributed equally...
...The papers presented at the conference by a number of government officials and researchers posed more questions than they answered...
...The Nixon administration's suppression of certain unemployment data and other social indicators is indicative of what can happen when the source of such data is tied too closely to government agencies...
...Or should it measure instead a community's level of satisfaction with such objective conditions...
...But if the index is used to estimate the consequences of a specific ac tion upon a more or less homogeneous, well defined community, the resulting decision might NOTEBOOK conceivably be more equitable than alternative methods of choice...
...No one, however, has yet solved the basic problem of the systems approach...
...This may not be the case until a problem becomes glaringly serious...
...Strong interest groups continue to influence the planners, and, through the manipulation of a few key variables, costbenefit analyses can often be used to justify any project or regulation...
...472 NOTEBOOK...
...Similarly, how would the data be collected, and to whom would it be reported...
...Perhaps the most important issue is: how should "quality of life" be defined...
...For a satisfaction-oriented qualityoflife index would imply that it makes no difference whether government actually improves conditions or simply convinces the public that existing conditions are satisfactory...
...On the other hand, any attempt to estimate the "weights" without consulting the community whose quality of life is being estimated is clearly elitist and to be avoided...
...If it is the function of government to satisfy its constituents, then, some argue, the components should measure a community's satisfaction with objective conditions, and not only the conditions themselves...
...Thus it is not surprising that West European nations embracing varying degrees of "socialisticness" have taken a great interest in both social indicators and a quality-of-life index...
...Other groups, such as the National Wildlife Federation, have taken a much more arbitrary approach and have sought to develop a single quality-of-life index for the whole of the United States...
...Should it be the same as a person's happiness...
...An example is the county of San Diego, which is attempting to measure the costs and benefits of its efforts to clean up its environment...
...At present, as we have noted, there are only two, equally undesirable, alternatives...
...The phrase "quality of life" seems to defy definition...
...Because of its extensive potential impact, the idea of a qualityoflife index is clearly not a technical matter...
...Nevertheless, with the analytical tools developed over the last two decades, a genuine alternative to political bargaining does exist and is now increasingly applied...
...What value to society, for instance—to take our example of a pollution-control regulation— are the jobs that will be lost because of new tight controls, versus the cleaner air against which these jobs must ultimately be traded...
...In the United States the social-indicator movement is tied to the very moderate liberalism of the Kennedy-Johnson years, and systems analysis was first developed at such think tanks as Rand, which are close to the defense establishment...
...Another serious issue: should a quality-oflife index attempt to measure "absolutes" such as justice...
...If the proposed action would affect several communities, separate index numbers could be estimated for each, and the resulting collection of summary numbers would presumably be better than none at all...
...It deserves to be widely discussed, so that as many as possible of the problems involved are avoided—assuming, that is, it should be used at all...
...Those who support this approach claim that it is the best approximation to "democratic" methods possible under the circumstances...
...In that case, one would have to include in the definition innumerable and presumably unmeasurable components of security, self-acceptance, fear, and the like...
...If data on the quality of life of a community were kept from those outside of government, it would become a political tool that could be used against the "outs...
...One way to "solve" such problems is to let the affected interest groups lobby and persuade or pressure the relevant bureaucrat to decide according to their own interests...
...But a decision to measure justice (even if it could be done) and place it on a par with, say, the rapidity of mass transit raises a basic ethical problem...
...For this would be just as biased a rule as those resulting from the old-style bargaining process, if not more so...
...The attempt to measure the quality of life is motivated by the increasingly complex problems of government planning and regulation of industry...
...The Environmental Protection Agency is doing preliminary research toward developing a quality-of-life index, but it is too early to say whether the index would be used to judge between decisions and projects of a national scope...
...The alternative approach, which has become more common since World War II, is that of "systems" and "cost-benefit" analysis...
...If the "weights" of this index are chosen so that they reflect the relevant community's preferences, the decisionmaker would have a concrete indication of what kinds of decisions are really in the public interest...
...These last paragraphs summarize the thinking of a number of government agencies and private groups in their attempt to devise a quality-of-life index...
...It would imply that if improvements in other areas are great enough, those improvements would "balance out" a decline in, for example, civil liberties...
...The second, systems and cost-benefit analysis using only GNP figures as estimators of relative value, is at best elitist and at worst ignores any consequence that cannot be readily valued in monetary terms...
...Presumably one person's list of characteristics is bound to be different from another's, because of differences in background and personality...
...In this approach a government planner or a consulting firm tries to quantify the costs and benefits of a specific proposal, usually in monetary terms, and the decision-maker is supposed to choose the alternative with the highest ratio of benefits to costs...
...A decision to simply register a community's preferences implies that it always knows what is best for itself and what its problems are...
...A major problem of the systems approach is how to quantify the wide range of consequences of public-works projects and government regulations...
...If any one of the contending approaches wins out, it would have a wide impact, simply because it would be used as a standard criterion of the desirability of alternative government actions...
...often those most adversely affected by a government project are not politically organized at all...
Vol. 20 • September 1973 • No. 4
