1. 5. Concepts And Measures Of ‘Development’
COMMENTS
Gareth Austin 17/10/2012

2. Aim
Just to add additional points and remarks to this very interesting and wide-ranging team presentation

3. ‘Fitness for purpose’ Another reason for adopting this criterion:
justification for using measure/data that are less than perfect

4. Foreign Policy of the Calorie
Including in ideological/political context of Cold War

5. ‘Why were so many social scientists wrong about the Green Revolution?’
Encouraging that all sides have now reached consensus
Evidence does matter in social science debates, albeit progress on controversial issues is often crabwise at best
Also note Jean-Marc Gonçlaves Diaz’s review of Orr: the political provenance of the Green Revolution technology
Helps explain why lib-left scholars were sceptical

6. GDP: More on problems Problem of uncounted output
Estimated ‘GDP’ figures in Africa tend to rise according only to the directly measured components:
new population census figures or higher exports
Even when non-counted output is known to be a huge % of the total

7. GDP: A Partial Defence
A partial defence: clearly insufficient as measure of human dev
But remains useful to have a single number for output of a given territory
Less ‘vulgar’ than HDI: latter a composite, so taking vulgarity to a different level!

8. Gini coefficient
National-level data often available only fairly recently, e.g. in SS Africa begin only late 1980s, & initially just for a few countries

9. HDI Beware of the index number problem: weighting
Problem of non-linear relationship between values of each social indicator and its achievement, as Sen admitted, with ‘say, longevity is high, it becomes more of an achievement to raise it further’
Leandro Prados de la Escosura IHDI

10. Better Life, Happy Planet
Weighting problem again! To say the least, subjective
‘Happy Planet Index’ not a measure of peoples’ actual ‘deep happiness’, but a measure of what its compilers think ought to make people deeply happy

11. Happiness Index (from surveys)
Cross-cultural problem
Happiness & history: Liberia case
Muslow’s hierarchy of prepotent needs
‘Hedonic treadmill’: the rich are happier than the poor (subject to above), but societies do not become happier as they become richer
Equality makes people happy!
Cf., much more broadly, cf. Wilkinson & Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, 2009

12. Other Measures: Heights
Anthropometry (R. Steckel, J. Baten)
Surprisingly good measure of changing physical welfare
Sensitive measure of equality of opportunity
Which countries have no correlation between distribution of income and distribution of heights?

13. Heights cntd
A pure output measure, available in large samples for periods and places where price-related data are few
A. Moradi work on Sub-Saharan Africa (e.g JEH and JID articles)

14. Distinction between measures for explanation and measures of achievement
HDI (or IHDI) useful measure of development outcomes, good for setting goals of policy

15. ‘Quantifying the World’
Need to be self-conscious about the relative novelty of our obsession with quantification
Enormously powerful and helpful innovation
But we need to be careful not to neglect causes or aims that cannot be quantified

16. CONCLUSON Many thanks to the presenting team!