Posner: Show Me the Money (and Little Else)
posted by Frank Pasquale
Many scholars are interested in new ways of measuring well-being that go beyond crude measures of income. I have thought of the UN Human Development Index as a good step in this direction, but Richard Posner has come out against it.
I agree with Posner’s critique of commensurability implicit in such a ranking, and his points about the distortions that can be caused by the “bunching” of many countries around one indicator. But if there are going to be rankings by income, I would think he would welcome alternative perspectives. Instead, he frets that the US loses out in the UNHDI because its life expectancy figures are lower than many other countries. I found this section of his critique troubling:
If a country devotes resources to improving life expectancy, it has to give up some other good. It is hard to say that the United States is making a mistake in not spending more resources on extending life expectancy; many Americans think that we spend too much on health care already. One reason (though by no means the only one) that the United States ranks only 44th in life expectancy is that our large black population has an abnormally high death rate; the average life expectancy of black male Americans is only 69. This shockingly high death rate reflects deep-seated problems of American blacks that would probably cost an enormous amount of money to solve. The political will to expend those resources does not exist. This may be a misfortune, a tragedy, or even a sin, but to use it to push the United States down in an index of human development is a political judgment, rather than anything determined by neutral social science.
Query: is the UN constrained to measure well-being only via neutral social science? Is that even possible? Well-being and development are inherently normative concepts. Their capacity to reflect a society’s “misfortunes, tragedies, or sins” is a feature, not a bug.
December 17, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science
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Responses (3)
Logan G - December 17, 2007 at 7:28 pm
The political will to expend those resources does not exist.
Certainly measuring “respect for human life” is essential to quantifying national health. There are nations whose body politic recognizes that the health of each citizen matters. The UN should not discount the value of any human being in its report.
Logan G - December 17, 2007 at 7:29 pm
The political will to expend those resources does not exist.
Certainly measuring “respect for human life” is essential to quantifying national health. There are nations whose body politic recognizes that the health of each citizen matters. The UN should not discount the value of any human being in its report.
Daniel Goldberg - December 17, 2007 at 7:46 pm
It’s surprising to me that anyone who could write “The Jurisprudence of Skepticism” could harbor a belief in a “neutral social science.” Posner’s critique strikes me as odd — he acknowledges that the index measures exactly what it purports to, but that in acknowledging some of the sociopolitical realities of American society — that we tolerate ever-widening economic and social disparities, among others — it somehow is flawed?
Those kinds of social and political factors are exactly what the index should measure, in no small part because such social determinants are far and away the primary factors of health by almost any measure (not just life expectancy). As such, to criticize the index for building it into the assessment is somewhat strange to me.
Moreover, as much as he can be for a Nobel laureate, Sen continues to be underestimated, IMO. He demonstrated almost 25 years ago that many of the most severe calamities to befall societies — like famine — are largely causaed by social and political conditions, rather than by “natural” disasters like drought and disease. Any development index that purported to ignore the ways political and social factors determine health would be worse than useless, as it might perpetrate the fallacy that if we just focus on acute care, we can really improve our population health.
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