Formulating a Human Well-Being Index Based on Nussbaum’s Central Capabilities

Abstract

For decades, scholars and political organizations have grappled with the problem of how to define and measure human development and well-being as part of the global endeavor to assess and alleviate poverty. Initially, academics evaluated human development exclusively through economic metrics; however, critics such as Amartya Sen noted that these measures were not designed to capture human well-being. As an alternative, Sen (1985) formulated the capabilities approach that characterizes poverty as a person’s inability to potentially achieve different combinations of “functionings,” which are the various things that a person values doing or being. Building on Sen’s unique approach, Martha Nussbaum (2011) formulated a list of ten central capabilities that she viewed as the basis for achieving a minimum of human dignity. The purpose of this thesis is to formulate a human well-being index based on Nussbaum’s central capabilities approach (the “Capabilities Index”). My primary research question is whether an alternative human development index based on this approach captures components of country-level well-being that existing indices do not. I hypothesize that (1) there will be a significant difference between purely economic measures of well-being and indices that purport to capture human well-being using non-economic measures, including the Capabilities Index; (2) there will be a significant difference in the way that the Capabilities Index ranks and quantifies a country’s human development progress when compared to traditional measurements and indices; (3) Capabilities Index values for countries will be a good predictor of variation in country-level subjective well-being scores; and (4) to the extent that the Capabilities Index is similar in nature to existing indices, it measures some aspects of human well-being that are important for human flourishing, but are absent from other indices and, therefore, should be included in an ideal index. In order to test the hypotheses concerning the Capabilities Index, I relied upon Pearson’s correlation, Spearman’s rank correlation, and step-wise multiple linear regression to analyze a sample of indexed, well-being scores for a total of 109 countries, which consisted of 60 countries with complete datasets, 36 countries with one of 20 metrics missing, and 13 countries with two metrics missing. The results indicate that gross national income per capita, an economic measure, is strongly correlated with almost all well-being indices. However, economic data fail to identify the drivers of well-being and fail to explain differences in subjective well-being, particularly among the wealthiest countries. The Capabilities Index does account for these differences, but it is strongly correlated with four existing well-being indices: the Human Development Index, the Where-to-be-Born Index, the Social Progress Index, and the Sustainable Development Goals (“SDG”) Index. While the Capabilities Index is more robust than the first two, it most resembles the Social Progress Index and the SDG Index, which each measure more than twice as many aspects of well-being than the Capabilities Index does. To the extent that these indices differ in rating country-level well-being, these differences are primarily due to the Capabilities Index’s emphasis on individual liberties. Because variation in such liberties plays a significant role in predicting subjective well-being, the ideal human well-being index should include them.