Abstract
The paper introduces a poset-generalizability perspective for analysing human development indicators. It suggests a new method for identifying admissibility of different informational spaces and criteria in human development analysis. From its inception, the Capability Approach has argued for informational pluralism in normative evaluations. But in practice, it has turned its back to other (non-capability) informational spaces for being imperfect, biased or incomplete and providing a mere evidential role in normative evaluations. This paper offers the construction of a proper method to overcome this shortcoming. It combines tools from poset analysis and generalizability theory to put forward a systematic categorization of cases with different informational spaces. It provides illustrations by using key informational spaces, namely, resources, rights, subjective well-being and capabilities. The offered method is simpler and more concrete than mere human development guidelines and at the same time it avoids results based on automatic calculations. The paper concludes with implications for human development policies and an agenda for further work.
Highlights
Human development is multidimensional; quite often it is represented by composite indicators (CIs) that lump together incommensurable features of countries or individuals into a single representation of their development (Nussbaum, 1990; Sen, 2009; French et al, 2013)
Before we introduce the tools of Poset analysis it is important that we revise some key definitions, in particular those used in social choice theory (Sen, 2017)
They provide complete rankings that are to a certain extent artificial. Their dimensions can belong to common categories of informational spaces. They can all refer to resources, capabilities, rights or even to subjective information, as it is the case of the ‘Ranking of Happiness’ (Helliwell et al, 2020)
Summary
Human development is multidimensional; quite often it is represented by composite indicators (CIs) that lump together incommensurable features of countries or individuals into a single representation of their development (Nussbaum, 1990; Sen, 2009; French et al, 2013). As much as the communication benefits of CIs are self-evident, elaborating these indicators entails a range of pragmatic choices that have been criticised for being extremely subjective, arbitrary, potentially misleading and prone to obscure essential information (Barclay et al, 2019; Cherchye et al, 2007; Fattore, 2016; Freudenberg, 2003; Saltelli, 2007). Recent alternatives, such as the ‘trichotomic segmentation approach’ (Smirlis, 2020), the ‘data envelopment analysis’ for corporate social performance Methodologically speaking the rankings produced by human development indicators are meant to be ordinal and comparative in nature (Comim, 2008)
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