Abstract
It is quite natural that in the current global transition from the “era of growth” to the “era of stability,” the importance of qualitative changes in all spheres of life is increasing. It is indicators of the quality of life in different countries of the world that play an important role among the indicators characterizing these changes. Quality of life depends on both material, social, and psychological factors. Taking into account the existing approaches to determining the quality of life, Malkov et al. make an attempt to create an integrated index that considers both subjective (psychological) and objective aspects of its assessment. The notion that the higher the quality of life, the more basic material, social, and spiritual needs are met, is used as a methodological basis for the construction of the index. When constructing the index, Malkov et al use Maslow’s theory of the “pyramid” of needs (the first, basic, hierarchical level within the “pyramid” is physiological needs, the last level is the need for self-actualization). For each type of needs, indicators characterizing the degree of their satisfaction (or, on the contrary, dissatisfaction) have been selected. The chapter contains a description of the methodology used and some calculation results.
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Notes
- 1.
The GDP indicator is often subjected to generally fair criticism (see, e.g., Easterlin, 2010; Costanza et al., 2014; McElwee & Daly, 2014; Goldsmith, 2019; Kapoor & Debroy, 2019), however sometimes criticism is mainly intended to hide the fact that the potential of high income states has weakened (see Grinin & Grinin, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c for detail). On economic growth and its perspectives see chapter “Economics. Optimizing Growth” (Grinin et al., 2023a, this volume). Work on the formation of indicators which can replace GDP is underway (see, e.g., Ahmad et al., 1991; ul Haq, 1995; Banerjee & Duflo, 2019; Masood, 2021, Colman, 2022).
- 2.
On relationship between life expectancy and quality of life see also chapter “Global Ageing – an Integral Problem of the Future. How to Turn a Problem into a Development Driver?” (Grinin et al., 2023, this volume) and chapter “Socio-Political Transformations. A Difficult Path to Cybernetic Society” (Grinin et al., 2023b, this volume).
- 3.
In principle, other methods of transforming unified data are also possible, but as further studies have shown, they have little effect on the final comparative assessments of the quality of life in different countries.
- 4.
Unlike the Legatum Prosperity Index, the HDI index includes only three indicators, which, in our opinion, is clearly not enough to assess the quality of life.
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Acknowledgment
This work was done with the support of MSU Program of Development, Project No 23A-SCH05-03.
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Malkov, S., Bilyuga, S., Musieva, J. (2023). Analyzing Social Self-Organization and Historical Dynamics: Life Quality Index. In: Sadovnichy, V., Akaev, A., Ilyin, I., Malkov, S., Grinin, L., Korotayev, A. (eds) Reconsidering the Limits to Growth. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34999-7_22
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