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The Standard of living refers to the quality and quantity of goods and services available to people. It is generally measured by real (i.e. inflation adjusted) income per person, although sometimes other measures may be used; examples are access to certain goods (such as number of refrigerators per 1000 people), or measures of health such as life expectancy.
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. Jump to: navigation, search 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. In economics the Pareto index is a measure of the breadth of income distribution. ...
In statistics, mean has two related meanings: the average in ordinary English, which is more correctly called the arithmetic mean, to distinguish it from geometric mean or harmonic mean. ...
Jump to: navigation, search A boy from an East Cipinang trash dump slum in Jakarta, Indonesia shows his find. ...
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