Measuring poverty – measuring well-being

Measuring poverty:

One of the challenges in public policy work is measuring outcomes. In CPJ’s poverty reduction strategy initiative, we are advocating that such a strategy requires “a vision with measurable targets and timelines, an action plan and a budget, mechanisms of accountability and poverty indicators to monitor progress.” Coming up with an agreed upon poverty indicator is not a simple task; however, it is an important step in being able to measure progress on reducing poverty.

Sometimes poverty indicators rely on simplistically looking at an individual or a family’s income (and the basket of goods that income can buy) as the measurement. Others assume that poverty is much more complex than income and needs to account for measures of health, a sense of community, and other social outcomes.

CPJ supporter John Hiemstra writes, “Poverty exists when persons, associations or institutions lack the resources and space they need to fulfill their God-given responsibilities and callings. … Poverty is as multi-dimensional as the human beings God created. People can be weakened in their ability to fulfill their callings for more reasons than simply the lack of material resources. People can become poor in social, economic, psychological, and spiritual ways. They can be family-poor, job-poor, friends-poor, food-poor, cash-poor, culture-poor, land-poor, etc.”

Measuring poverty requires looking at looking at a wider view of the nature of poverty, but also at a wider view of the nature of well-being.

Measuring well-being:

There has been a variety of work done on measuring a broader vision for what a good life, without poverty, can look like.

In their 1989 book For the Common Good, Herman Daly and John Cobb, an economist and a theologian respectively, called for an alternative to the use of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measurement of “progress” or well-being in society. Their proposed “Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare” inspired the development in the U.S. of a “genuine progress indicator” in 1995.

In Canada, the two main proponents of a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) are Mark Anielski, who helped develop the Alberta GPI with the Pembina Institute, and Ron Colman, who developed the GPI Atlantic.

Anielski has recently published The Economics of Happiness: Rediscovering Genuine Wealth, building on his continuing work on genuine progress. Ron Colman is heading up the current development of a Canadian Index of Well-being supported by the Atkinson Foundation and championed by Roy Romanow.

The Canadian Index of Well-Being will “treat beneficial activities as assets and harmful ones as deficits.” It it will track changes in eight quality-of-life categories or “domains.” These domains include such things as time use, community vitality, and civic engagement along with the more expected categories like health and the environment.

Further information on measuring well-being in Canada, including a proposed private members bill on the topic, can be found here.

As we envision Canada without poverty, let’s also push the boundaries and envision what a Canada characterized by well-being looks like.