Measurement Is Not Everything, But It Does Make a Difference

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the help of the Human Development Index, Mahbub ul Haq demonstrated that by focusing attention away from an exclusive concern with income as the only dimension in which to assess well-being, measurement which also involved a more general concern with other “spaces” of well-being could make a difference to comparative evaluations of, and policy perspectives on, human development. This is an example of the difference which measurement can make when the concern is with a shift in what is being measured rather than in how it is measured. In this lecture, the “space” in which well-being is measured – the conventional money-metric space – is retained, while some consequences of changing the “aggregation protocols” of measurement are examined. Specifically, the concern is with measures of inequality and poverty which have typically been interpreted as (population- and income-) relative measures, and with how a shift to arguably more reasonable measures which are intermediate between relative and absolute conceptualizations could make a difference to comparative assessments of magnitudes over time and across space.