Measurement Is Not Everything, But It Does Make a Difference

ABSTRACT

With the help of the Human Development Index, Mahbub ul Haq demonstrated that by focusing attention away from an exclusive concern with income as the only dimension in which to assess well-being, measurement which also involved a more general concern with other “spaces” of well-being could make a difference to comparative evaluations of, and policy perspectives on, human development. This is an example of the difference which measurement can make when the concern is with a shift in what is being measured rather than in how it is measured. In this lecture, the “space” in which well-being is measured – the conventional money-metric space – is retained, while some consequences of changing the “aggregation protocols” of measurement are examined. Specifically, the concern is with measures of inequality and poverty which have typically been interpreted as (population- and income-) relative measures, and with how a shift to arguably more reasonable measures which are intermediate between relative and absolute conceptualizations could make a difference to comparative assessments of magnitudes over time and across space.

KEYWORDS:

• Mahbub ul Haq
• measurement
• inequality
• poverty
• relative measures
• absolute and centrist measures

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Shorrocks (2005).

2 Basu (2001; 2006).

3 Palma (2011; 2016).

4 See Table A1 for detailed data in appendix.

5 From the Congressional Research Service report on Poverty in the United States in 2021 (available at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47354#:~:text=Under%20the%20SPM%2C%20the%20overall,from%2030.0%20million%20in%202020)., it can be ascertained that a rough guide to poverty thresholds in 2021 is obtained by assigning a poverty line of $13,788 to an individual who is not living in a family, of $17,529 to a family of two, of $21,559 to a family of three, and of $27,740 to a family of four. According to data on the distribution of households by household size (available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/242189/disitribution-of-households-in-the-us-by-household-size/), these four categories of household together account for nearly 91 per cent of all households, and respectively, for 28.45 per cent, 35.03 per cent, 15.03 per cent, and 12.39 per cent of the total. Taking the poverty line to be $27,740 for all families of size 4 or more, a weighted average poverty line based on the above household-size-specific poverty lines and their population shares yields (a lower bound on) the ‘aggregate’ poverty line figure of $19,264 employed in the text.

6 See Table A1 for detailed data in appendix.

7 For the precise numbers involved, see Table A2 in appendix.

8 World Bank (2020).

9 For the precise numbers involved, see Table A3 in appendix.

10 Dalton (1920); Kolm (1976a; 1976b).

11 Krtscha (1994).

12 For the precise numbers involved, see Table A3 in appendix.

13 See Table A4 for detailed data, extracted from Subramanian and Jayaraj (2013).

14 For the precise numbers involved, see Table A4 in appendix.

15 Del Rio and Ruiz-Castillo (2001); Atkinson and Brandolini (2010); Bosmans, Decancq, and Decoster (2014); Nino-Zarazua, Roope, and Tarp (2017).

16 Reddy and Pogge (2010).

17 Subramanian (2002); Chakravarty, Kanbur, and Mukherjee (2006); Mukherjee (2006); Zoli (2009); Subramanian and Mukherjee (2018).

18 Broome (1996).

19 Sen (1981).

20 For the precise numbers involved, see Table A5, constructed from data available in Hasell (2022).

21 Arriaga (1970).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S. Subramanian

S. Subramanian is a former professor from the Madras Institute of Development Studies and a former National Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research. He has research interests in aspects of social and economic measurement, collective choice theory, and development economics. He is a Fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association.