From Clio Infrastructure
The Quality of Life: life expectancy, human capital, agency
One of the aims of CLIO-INFRA is to help broaden the concept of economic development that is being used by economists and economic historians, by making available data and estimates of other indicators of the ‘quality of life’ which can be used in economic and historical research. Other measures of performance are life expectancy (the subject of the hub on gender and demography), human capital (literacy for example) studied by the hub on that topic, and measures of inequality, which will also be part of the work of the central hub.
We would like to broaden the concept of economic development even further, and, following Sen’s and Nussbaum’s ideas about the multidimensional character of economic development, also pay systematic attention to the ways in which the concept of agency can be measured for historical societies. It again has a number of dimensions – or can be approached in different ways – but elements of this approach are 1) human capital/education (the more human capital, the more ‘agency’), 2) political rights (measured as part of the institutions hub, linked to the PolityIV/constraints on the executive variable) and 3) gender relations/the gender gap, related (amongst others) to family systems. To give an example of the latter: the average age of marriage of women, and the difference in average age of marriage between men and women, can both be used as indices of the degree of ‘agency’ of women in the family system and/or the household they are part of. De Moor and Van Zanden have suggested the ‘girlpower-index’ to measure this.
To develop those ideas more fully, a conference will be organized during the first year of the planning cycle of CLIO-INFRA, to discuss these issues more in detail (and in particular the question: can we measure ‘development as freedom’(Sen), or the degree of ‘agency’ of societies in the past). Pending the outcome of this conference, we expect that we will be able to estimate quality of life with the data collected by the set of hubs.
