Needs and Wants: What is Social Progress and How Should it be Measured

Lars Osberg

A chapter in The Review of Economic Performance and Social Progress 2001: The Longest Decade: Canada in the 1990s, 2001, vol. 1 from Centre for the Study of Living Standards, The Institutute for Research on Public Policy

Abstract: In this chapter, Lars Osberg has the daunting task of examining the conceptual issues involved in defining and measuring social progress. As he highlights in his introduction, while much had been made of the fact that Canada in 2000 earned first place in the United Nations' Human Development Index, other indices have produced much less brilliant results. Modern pluralist societies, however, have no common benchmark from which to define the "good" society. As a result, Osberg argues, "social progress" in a liberal society must be measured in the "enabling" sense that a society progresses when it enables more of its citizens to achieve the kind of life they personally value. Some of the empirical difficulties involved in constructing a measure of the attainment of social and economic rights are discussed and several quantitative indices of social progress are examined using the prism of human rights.

Keywords: Well-being; Wellbeing; Well Being; Social Progress; Social; Societal; Society; Values; Rights; Economic Rights; Social Rights; Human Rights; Index; Indexes; Indices; Indicator; Indicators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 I31 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
ISBN: 0-88645-190-6
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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