In Pursuit of the Quality of Life

Citation

Armour, L. (1999), "In Pursuit of the Quality of Life", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 572-576. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijse.1999.26.4.572.2

The social sciences, presumably, are about understanding economic and social systems in the hope that we can learn how to make them better ‐ which means improving the quality of someone’s life and ideally improving everyone’s life. The editor of this book and his 11 authors are agreed that the abandonment of the gross national product as the main measure of life quality (an event they date from the 1970s) was a good thing.

The questions they pose have to do with what might replace the GNP as a measure of wellbeing, and with understanding the whole notion of life quality. Their concerns range from the general (what strategies should we propose for “developing” countries and how can we tell if our own lives are getting better?) to the concrete and pressing puzzles of medical technology (what sort of life is worth spending enormous sums of money to preserve?).

In one sense their preoccupations are not new. While economists have more often than not assumed that the good working of the free market and the promotion of the good life go hand in hand, there have always been doubts. At a very general level some things have seemed obvious: people are happy when they are free and when, most of the time, they get what they want. The eighteenth century philosopher Nicholas Malebranche defined liberty, plausibly enough, as doing what you want, and one might define happiness as getting what you want and getting it in your own way. Selling what you have at the highest price available and buying what you want at the lowest price would seem likely to march one along this path as well as anything. But there are always doubts.

Perhaps the acquisitive drive which the economy exploits is itself a symptom of unhappiness. Malebranche went on to say that not just having things but getting things in their right order was crucial. There is a social good which consists in arranging for us to play our parts in a satisfying way. Malebranche thought we should turn to God for this order, and Adam Smith, who read him, turned in The Wealth of Nations, when he was through with butchers and bakers, to the social system. Education, religion, family life and even philosophers attracted his attention.

The authors contributing to this book collectively exploit the doubts we might have about purely economic ideas of the good life. It turns out that economic wellbeing rates fairly low in people’s scale of things, at any rate, once they have reached a certain level of comfort.

Most of the studies relate to life in Britain, but they are likely to hold for many other groups as well. It seems that a lot of what people regard as “quality of life” could be added to by distributing some of the wealth to the poorest people, while very little is added to by giving more to the rich. Alas, the world economy right now seems strongly to favour an increasing share for the richest people and a decreasing share for the poorest.

The editor is an economic historian. One of the authors is a professor of international economics, three are sociologists of one sort or another, and one is a political scientist. But the remaining six are on the overlapping edges of disciplines: a social psychologist, a fellow of a centre for “micro‐social change”, a director of a social statistics unit, the director of a research centre in development. One is a university Vice‐Chancellor. Ten are working in the UK; one is a retired Yale professor.

Most of what the authors claim to know about the quality of life comes from surveys of people’s subjective preferences. In a sense these are an answer to the complaint that we don’t know much about what the quality of life really amounts to. The authors mostly think that a high quality life is one which corresponds to the possessor’s view of what a high quality of life is, and it turns out that there is substantial agreement. The agreement can be tested by repeating the enquiry on different populations and by sophisticated techniques for assessing the statistical correlations between various responses and people’s picture of the good life.

But there are dark suspicions which one may have about such things. Much depends on what questions one asks and whether or not people are inhibited in their answers. Religion is only mentioned once ‐ and briefly ‐ in this book, and, while sex is mentioned, it is rather downplayed. Given that these are British studies one suspects that neither the editors of The Sun and The People on one side, nor the Church Times and The Tablet on the other, would find these analyses very promising. And the editors of The Sun and The People have other evidence ‐ the kind of evidence about preferences that economists usually like ‐ about what the public prefers. Millions put out their hard earned money every day to look at the page three girls, but the authors say nothing about what this adds to (or subtracts from) the quality of life. The editors of the Church Times and The Tablet may claim a higher authority for their data.

Nonetheless many of the basic issues which figure in “quality of life” debates are discussed in this book. The most troubling questions are raised by Christopher Bliss. It is clear that we now face a dilemma. If we try to raise everyone’s standard of living to that of the industrialised world we are likely to face an environmental disaster or at least to run out of resources. If we do not move to raise their standards we may face bloody war (perhaps backed with the atomic weapons the third world is quickly developing). But Bliss says “almost nothing can be proved right or wrong with any confidence as we stare into the future”. Economists, he thinks (he is Professor of International Economics at Oxford), have been especially bad at predicting. The “dismal science”, he says, “has often been [truly] dismal.” He does not have a solution except that it is best to watch what people do and to try to maximise their preferences. Ways of dealing with the environment like imposing a “carbon tax” are not too likely to work. (Bliss thinks we do not know what our resources are, and such a tax would inhibit exploration ‐ another case of our not being able to predict.)

Frances Stewart reviews the puzzling debate set in train by international development agencies about whether, in assessing the need for action to improve people’s lives, one should try to identify “basic needs’”, examine “entitlements” or “capabilities”, or try to build what has come to be called a “human development index”. The United Nations has settled on an index made up of life expectancy, purchasing power and education, especially literacy. In such indexes countries like Canada and Denmark do very well. Peoples like the Semai of Malaysia, who have almost no social structure, and reportedly few problems except perhaps for those caused by visiting anthropologists, never appear at all. But it is not obvious that any sensible member of the Semai would want to move to Toronto.

Some issues the authors of this book discuss are more worrying and less susceptible to the foibles of preference sampling. Health is rated by everybody as crucial to a decent life. (Surprisingly, health rates only seventh in Michael Argyle’s “Life Satisfaction Index”, but this may be because it is so obvious that it does not come to mind as an issue.) The problem that it poses now is that we can spend almost any amount imaginable on keeping people alive indefinitely ‐ thereby exhausting our resources for a gain which may be minimal or in extreme cases non‐existent. We may even add to human misery. In his essay on health and quality of life, Ray Fitzpatrick raises a further complication: people adjust to their ill‐health, and when they are asked, they usually report considerable “wellbeing” even when outsiders tend to judge them as being in bad shape. This complicates the problem of deciding how much “added quality of life” is given by medical expenditures without adding anything much to the possibilities of dissolving the conundrums involved. No one seems to have any satisfactory answer to the question: Given that medical techniques exist which are so expensive that they would seriously undermine the social order if they were applied to everyone who might conceivably benefit from them, how do we decide who ought to benefit from them? Differently put: If some technique exists which will make life significantly better for someone or prolong his or her life, under what circumstances does there exist a right to it?

Two essays ‐ by Heather Joshi and Janet Finch ‐ raise questions about family life. Ms Joshi has investigated the problem of working mothers. Women, she notes, have far more choices now than they had in the past. In particular they can now (often) choose between staying at home and raising a family or going out to work. Most of them, though, choose to try to combine these options. They do remarkably well, but their lives are filled with new “tensions and dilemmas”. The period when women are away from the job market after having a child is tending to narrow, and though the evidence seems to be that working has improved women’s health rather than harmed it, the stresses caused by the fact that women still do most of the “unpaid work” in the home even when they are working may take a long‐term toll. Ms Finch has investigated changing family relationships ‐ confirming once again the belief that the breakdown of extended families in places like Bethnal Green has not been compensated for by effective new relationships in the distant quasi‐suburbs of London. Her discussion focuses on the shouldering of responsibilities. People still feel responsible for their relatives though circumstances make it very difficult for some of the responsibilities to be discharged. The suggestion is that deterioration of family relationships, caused chiefly by socio‐economic forces which separate people geographically and by the complexity of living arrangements now available, can severely worsen the quality of life.

Re‐planning cities and suburbs is one way in which governments intrude on the quality of life. Robert E. Lane raises questions about other kinds of interference which are bound to be even more contentious. To what extent should government intrude on the public consciousness by way of creating a moral ambience? Governments do ‐ and surely should ‐ strive to eliminate racism, bigotry, and social division based on all kinds of prejudice, for the obvious reason that government itself depends on the ability to get people to live and work together in peace. Education is part of this ‐ though it rarely nowadays focuses strongly on moral concerns. (Lane oddly speaks of “delinquent boys” and “pregnant girls” as if pregnancy, as such, was a species of delinquency.) But here the problem for a publicly‐run school system is to find a publicly acceptable basis for morality in a society which, nearly everywhere, is these days pluralistic.

All this ties in with Avner Offer’s concerns about advertising. Advertisers pay large sums of money in the hope that the public mind‐set can be influenced. Much of what they do is to encourage acquisitiveness. Much of their effort, too, is concerned to make strange associations (that between automobiles and pretty girls, for instance) and to associate their products generally with things their potential customers like. Little advertising is devoted to promoting charity, though television programmes which are much like long commercials are used to promote certain sorts of religion (most often fundamentalist). When advertisers turned to popular comic strip characters, The Cleveland Plain Dealer asked “How greedy can you get?”, but the weaving of products into already accepted elements of fantasy life seems deeply entrenched.

The competing claims of advertisers have clearly advanced scepticism. A table included by Offer reports the huge decline of American popular trust in leadership over the past 30 years. Trust in everything from the military through higher education to the trade unions has declined by nearly 50 per cent in that period, from highs above 60 per cent for several institutions to new lows just above 10 per cent for trade unions and 30 per cent for universities. A 35 per cent approval rating is now high for any institution.

In these circumstances, Robert Lane’s questions become pressing. Should government intervene to try to restore confidence or at least to provide the means with which to combat scepticism? The faint echo of the jackboot must be heard behind all such ideas ‐ but there is a crisis which is surely not improving the quality of life.

Duncan Gallie looks at the vital question of work satisfaction. It is fairly clear what sorts of jobs make people happy. Professors mostly like their work. Workers on automobile production lines are less sure. Are we getting fewer goods jobs? Are we headed for a mechanical world in which most work will be humanly devastating? Gallie says research is in its infancy and most people would agree that we have little good information about trends over time. Jonathan Gershuny and Brendan Halpin explore related questions about the use of time and personal satisfaction, but, again, more research seems needed.

Only Christopher Bliss expresses an overwhelming scepticism about theorising. But the book as a whole lacks any attempt to find a theoretical foundation for accounts of what human beings are and how they are to be understood. Detached quasi‐artefacts like “preferences” do not help us much in the absence of such a theory. And the failure to take seriously many factors found in human satisfaction — from religion, to art, to participation in the political process — probably stems from the fact that without such a theory one merely investigates what one happens to find interesting. And that may prove more confusing than helpful.