Quality of Life

From a sustainable development point of view, it is the most encompassing and less materialistic quality of life, rather than the limited standard of living, that is, together with environmental sustainability, the right yardstick to use to assess economic activity and social arrangements in general. Indeed, although economic growth is consuming, in absolute terms, more and more scarce environmental resources, there is ample evidence that past a given threshold, it no longer brings real improvement in the quality of life of the population, as measured by different indicators of objective (e.g., life expectancy or education) and subjective (e.g., reported happiness and satisfaction with life) well-being. In contrast, when asked what makes them feel good and happy, people in rich Western societies typically answer, in decreasing order of priority: partner and family relations, health, and a nice place to live, before money and financial situation.

It is therefore of the utmost importance to develop an adequate definition of quality of life, a precise identification of its main components, and reliable indicators for these components. Actually, this was exactly the research program of the social indicators movement that emerged in the 1960s in the United States and culminated with the publication in 1976 of The Quality of American Life: Perceptions, Evaluations and Satisfactions by A. Campbell, P. Converse, and W. L. Rodgers. Unfortunately, almost 40 years later, no consensus has been reached in the scientific arenas, or in the policy ones, on a workable definition, conception, and measure of quality of life. Even the vocabulary has not been stabilized so far; for instance, the terms quality of life and well-being are considered by some as equivalent, whereas others see significant differences between them. What is clear, however, is that both terms stand in contrast to narrow, monetary, or materialistic conceptions of the good life. Indeed, in the meaning of quality of life, both terms—quality and life—are important. The first emphasizes the fact that it is not only the number of things, relations, and satisfactions experienced that matters but also their kind, their intrinsic quality, and their worth. The second term, life, may signify different things; for example, that we are concerned with life taken as a whole and in all its dimensions in contrast to what is implied in the concept of “standard of living,” or it can stand for “daily life,” the set of mundane habits, practices, and routines that make the fabric of day-to-day existence. To illustrate, when a person explains she is trading higher earnings for a more interesting job, she expresses her preference for the quality of her work experience over of its pecuniary reward. In contrast, if she [Page 372]trades the same earnings for less strain, more time for children, and so on, it is the quality of her overall everyday life that she privileges.

What makes the concept so difficult to define and, still more, to measure, is the fact that it refers to a mix of objective living conditions (natural environment, neighborhood, housing, working conditions, income and wealth, political and civil rights, and so on), of functionings (being in good mental and physical health, loving and being loved, etc.), and of subjective evaluations of these living conditions and functionings. The multidimensionality and richness of everyday life, together with the mesh of objectivity and subjectivity in any process of evaluation by people of their own existence, are such that no satisfactory conception of quality of life can avoid some level of complexity. This is apparent in the two currently prevailing and most elaborated theories of quality of life: the one proposed by Amartya Sen and the one advocated by Ruut Veenhoven.

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