Happy Life Years

Intro
Need for a measure of quality of life in nations How to assess how well a nation is doing? One way is to look at the quality-of-life of the people who live there. This view is gaining prominence, both among policy makers and the general public. This begs the question what quality-of-life is precisely and how that can be measured comprehensively.

Assumed quality-of-life Quality-of-life in nations is commonly measured by taking stock of conditions that are believed to make for a better life, such as economic affluence, full employment and education. Measures of such conditions are added in an index, like the Human Development Index (HDI) or the Index of Social Progress (ISP). Items in such indexes are typically things that are on the political agenda and as such these indexes inform about progress on the way chosen. Yet these indexes do not tell us whether we are on the right track, that is, whether these policy achievements really improved the lives of citizens. Still another problem is that such measures typically assume that more is better and do not inform us about an optimum, e.g. how many years of education is optimal for a good life.

Apparent quality of life Another approach is to assess how well people thrive in a society. The focus is then on the outcomes of life, rather than on the preconditions. How well an organism thrives is typically reflected in its lifetime. In higher animals, thriving reflects also in affective experience and humans are moreover able to estimate how well they have felt over longer periods of time. These estimates of how we feel most of the time are at the basis of the appraisal of how happy we are. Hence in the case of humans, thriving reflects both in how long and how happy they live.