Good Societies, Financial Inequality and Secrecy, and a Good Life: from Aristotle to Piketty

In this paper we show that for a dataset of 105 countries, four candidate objective indexes (Human Development Index (HDI), Weighted Index of Social Progress (WISP), Social Progress Index (SPI) and Sustainable Society Index (SSI)) and one subjective index (World Happiness Survey (WHS)) of at least a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied Research in Quality of Life 2020-09, Vol.15 (4), p.1005-1054
Main Authors: Michalos, Alex C., Hatch, P. Maurine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Committees
Equality
Growth rate
Happiness
Income
Income distribution
Indexes
Inequality
Inheritance taxes
International finance
Political Science
Quality of life
Quality of Life Research
Secrecy
Social progress
Social Sciences
Society
Sociology
Wealth
Well being
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Summary:In this paper we show that for a dataset of 105 countries, four candidate objective indexes (Human Development Index (HDI), Weighted Index of Social Progress (WISP), Social Progress Index (SPI) and Sustainable Society Index (SSI)) and one subjective index (World Happiness Survey (WHS)) of at least aspects of the quality of life or human well-being have good convergent validity among themselves and expected statistically significant negative correlations with Gini measures of wealth and income, and a measure of political jurisdictions’ institutionalized financial secrecy (Financial Secrecy Scores (FSS)). A measure of offshore wealth as a fraction of GDP (FOW) showed only a couple significant correlations with one overall quality of life index (SSI). When we combined the four objective indexes to the subjective index to create overall measures of the quality of life (including Happy Life Years (HLY)), the correlations among the indexes increased. Most of the correlations increased again when we used Gini indexes to create wealth-equality overall quality of life indexes and these correlations were higher on average than those among income-equality overall quality of life indexes. Combining results using 21 quality of life/well-being indexes, we rank ordered 105 countries from best to worst. The top 10 in order were Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Australia, Finland, Netherlands, Slovakia, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark. This is the first time anyone has built the array of index options presented here based on a handful of originals. We offer them as another potential starting point for the next generation of researchers.
ISSN:1871-2584
1871-2576
DOI:10.1007/s11482-019-09717-0