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The standard of living refers to the quality and quantity of goods and services available to people and the way these services and goods are distributed within a population. It is generally measured by standards such as income inequality, poverty rate, real (i.e. inflation adjusted) income per person. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, educational standards and social rights are often used too. Examples are access to certain goods (such as number of refrigerators per 1000 people), or measures of health such as life expectancy. It is the ease by which people living in a country are able to satisfy their wants. Income inequality metrics or income distribution metrics are techniques used by economists to measure the distribution of income among members of a society. ...
The poverty line is the level of income below which one cannot afford to purchase all the resources one requires to live. ...
The idea of a 'standard' may be contrasted with the quality of life, which takes into account not only the material standard of living, but also other more subjective factors that contribute to human life, such as leisure, safety, cultural resources, social life, mental health, environmental quality issues etc. More complex means of measuring well-being must be employed to make such judgements, and these are very often political, thus controversial. Even among two nations or societies that have similar material standards of living, quality of life factors may in fact make one of these places more attractive to a given individual or group. The well-being or quality of life of a population is an important concern in economics and political science. ...
However, there can be problems even with just using numerical averages to compare material standards of living, as opposed to, for instance, a Pareto index. Standards of living are perhaps inherently subjective. As an example, countries with a very small, very rich upper class and a very large, very poor lower class may have a high mean level of income, even though the majority of people have a low "standard of living". This mirrors the problem of poverty measurement, which also tends towards the relative. This illustrates how distribution of income can disguise the actual Standard of living. In economics the Pareto index is a measure of the breadth of income distribution. ...
In statistics, mean has two related meanings: the arithmetic mean (and is distinguished from the geometric mean or harmonic mean). ...
A boy from an East Cipinang trash dump slum in Jakarta, Indonesia shows what he found. ...
There are many factors being considered before measuring standard of living. Some factors are gross domestic product, the per capita income, population, infrastructural development, stability (political and social), and many other indicators.
See also
The standard of living in the United States is one of the highest in the world by almost any measure. ...
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