The
standard of living refers to the quality and quantity of goods and services available to people, and the way these goods and services are distributed within a population. It is generally measured by standards such as
income inequality,
poverty rate, real (i.e.
inflation adjusted) income per person. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, educational standards and social rights are often used too. Examples are access to certain goods (such as number of refrigerators per 1000 people), or measures of health such as life expectancy.
It is the ease by which people living in a country are able to satisfy their wants.
The idea of a 'standard' may be contrasted with the
quality of life, which takes into account not only the material standard of living, but also other more subjective factors that contribute to human life, such as leisure, safety, cultural resources, social life, mental health, environmental quality issues etc. More complex means of measuring well-being must be employed to make such judgements, and these are very often political, thus controversial. Even among two nations or societies that have similar material standards of living, quality of life factors may in fact make one of these places more attractive to a given individual or group.
However, there can be problems even with just using numerical averages to compare material standards of living, as opposed to, for instance, a
Pareto index. Standards of living are perhaps inherently subjective. As an example, countries with a very small, very rich upper class and a very large, very poor lower class may have a high
mean level of income, even though the majority of people have a low "standard of living". This mirrors the problem of
poverty measurement, which also tends towards the relative. This illustrates how distribution of income can disguise the actual
Standard of living.
There are many factors being considered before measuring standard of living. Some factors are gross domestic product, the per capita income, population, infrastructural development, stability (political and social), and many other indicators.
See also
External links
Income inequality metrics or income distribution metrics are techniques used by economists to measure the distribution of income and economic inequality among the participants in a particular economy, such as that of a specific country or of the world in general.
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The poverty threshold, or poverty line, is the minimum level of income deemed necessary to achieve an adequate standard of living. In practice, like the definition of poverty, the official or common understanding of the poverty line is significantly higher in developed
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Inflation is measured as the growth of the money supply in an economy, without a commensurate increase in the supply of goods and services. This results in a rise in the general price level as measured against a standard level of purchasing power.
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Quality of Life is a 2004 drama film, telling the fictional story of two graffiti writers in the Mission District of San Francisco.
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In economics the Pareto index, named after the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, is a measure of the breadth of income or wealth distribution. It is one of the parameters specifying a Pareto distribution and embodies the Pareto principle.
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In statistics,
mean has two related meanings:
- the arithmetic mean (and is distinguished from the geometric mean or harmonic mean).
- the expected value of a random variable, which is also called the population mean.
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standard of living in the United States is one of the top 15 in the world by the standard economist measure of standard of living. Per capita income is high but also less evenly distributed than in most other developed countries; as a result, the United States fares particularly
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