Talk:Standard of living

Hard to understand
Standard of living is very hard to understand — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.160.101.191 (talk) 19:10, 8 September 2004 (UTC)

Gross domestic product
Why is there a link to GDP? Consider the fact that canada had less GDP than mexico recently. Clearly this is a terrible model of standard of living — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.64.188.255 (talk) 06:35, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Even though that may be true about Canada and Mexico, GDP is still a measurement of standard of living, whether you agree with this or not. I think that it is important that a link to GDP remain.--MrNiceGuy1113 (talk) 17:46, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Basic model for measuring
A basic model for measuring "material" standard of living would include Mean Income/GDP Per Capita, material goods available/consumed, economic growth and unemployment.

However, "measured" material well-being tells only part of the story. In many circumstances, "personal" and Quality of Life attributes and recourses make one nation or society an appealing place to live, raise a family, visit or trade with. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.181.161.64 (talk) 02:16, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

This article a) fails to explain how living standards are measured, b) fails to explain that there is no agreed method for measuring this concept. A full explanation should compare and discuss GDP per capita, PPP, HDI, HPI, Gini coefficient and many other factors. Crawiki (talk) 17:20, 23 November 2017 (UTC) Crawiki (talk) 17:20, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

Can anybody tell me about the topic: "standard of living has improve but not the quality of life"?
In a rich life happiness is not guaranteed. In other words happiness is a state of mind, and money doesn't make you happy it just pays the bills and brings in the groceries. You may have a career but you may not like working that job. smart group Cuttin' loose and dancing to the beat of my own drum — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.148.185.69 (talk) 19:42, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
 * read  Rjensen 20:47, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Use the CIA World Factbook (External Links). It is really good! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.67.249.27 (talk) 21:20, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

What I need is relative cost of living. For example, with $1,000 a month for 1-bed-room rent, it takes over $80k to get by in suburban Washington DC, but you can BUY a house in Ada, OK for $20k ($100 a month) and live a comfortable life earning just 12 grand a year. If you had no house payment, ate out of your garden and your own livestock, didn't have cable, internet or phone, you could probably live fine for $1 a day. So how do we measure "poverty"? DeknMike (talk) 14:55, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I think these are too fine of lines being drawn. Yes, it is hard to measure what is happiness because there are not any variable to measure, but happiness in this sense is not on the individual level.--MrNiceGuy1113 (talk) 17:56, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Edits
There is a spelling error in discrepancy and the example of Korea after the "historical" adjective before describing Germany can cause confusion as up until the 70's North Korea was vastly more wealthy than South Korea in addition to having a low income gradient among people. Basically the whole thing should be re-worded and expanded, this is a very weak and not quite informative —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.106.168.116 (talk) 19:41, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Gross_national_happiness
I was very surprised to find the standard of living article so sparse, but the Gross_national_happiness article so full. Mathiastck (talk) 22:13, 3 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Perhaps you shouldn't have been. Happiness is much more fundamental than financial status. Capitalism tends to only measure things in terms of money yet examples of having high money and low happiness are ubiquitous, as with low money and high happiness. There is plenty of research showing that once a person has basic necessities (food, shelter) there is no correlation between increased wealth and increased happiness.

Website
The external link to international living website gave me a 'the webpage could not be displayed' error. Is the website gone, or simply moved? Mako Addicted (talk) 08:31, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Pending changes
This article is one of a number selected for the early stage of the trial of the Pending Changes system on the English language Wikipedia. All the articles listed at Pending changes/Queue  are being considered for level 1 pending changes protection.

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Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 00:09, 17 June 2010 (UTC).

Access to land!?
This line (completely without citation): "A more realistic measure [of standard of living] is the number of people who have access to free subsistence land."

How is this at all a reasonable measure of standard of living? That number in Manhattan is zero. Many places in sub-Saharan Africa it is above zero. Are we really going to argue that sub-Saharan Africans enjoy a dramatically higher standard of living than Manhattanites!? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.118.14.90 (talk) 05:35, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Questionable
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 (a measure of the breadth of income or wealth distribution). 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.

This whole paragraph needs referenced. The part about inherently subjective possibly should be removed. It seems as if it is part of an essay that was added.--MrNiceGuy1113 (talk) 18:15, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Standards of housing & related
I've travelled some in the world, and so have many people I've known or met. In casual discussions of "standard of living" people (travellers) often talk about the state of the housing that people are living in. And the institutional buildings. Not necessarily how new or expensive the houses or apartments or schools are, but whether they are shabby or in good repair - and whether the buildings perhaps have some beauty (be they older or recent, traditional or modern in style, or maybe just quaint). Also, whether the neighborhoods have amenities like parks and/or sports areas that are kept well. And whether the streets and roads are in good repair.

And what about the quality of the available food? Good, mediocre, or poor? I'm not referring to the cuisine of the country, but the quality of the basic foodstuffs.

Income (or the GDP) of the country and distribution of that money may be related, but may have an indirect or even tenuous relation to standard of living indicators I'm mentioning.Joel Russ (talk) 20:31, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

How business organization add to a country's standard of living and quality of life?
Hello everyone could you help me to solve this one and thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.202.169.251 (talk) 11:04, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Criticism
Moved from the article to talk page. The issue is that the content is very subjective and without references. It first claims that the issue is that there are only numerical averages used and what the issue is with that, but then in the second paragraph talks about the issue that not only average is used and distribution of income is used as well, and what is the issue with that. So which one is true? Moreover, the second paragraph has many assumptions and generalizations present which look mostly like original research.

There can be problems even with just using numerical averages to compare material standards of living, as opposed to, for instance, a Pareto index (a measure of the breadth of income or wealth distribution). 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.

Likewise Country A, a perfectly socialist country with a planned economy with very low average per capita income would receive a higher score for having lower income inequality than Country B with a higher income inequality, even if the bottom of Country B's population distribution had a higher per capita income than Country A. Real examples of this include former East Germany compared to former West Germany or Croatia compared to Italy. In each case, the socialist country has a low income discrepancy (and therefore would score high in that regard), but lower per capita incomes than a large majority of their neighboring counterpart. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitar (talk • contribs) 07:53, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Removing ranks of Quality of Life from summary
It's misleading to conclude the summary for an article on Standard of Living with ranks on Quality of Life. Those would perhaps be appropriate for the summary in the quality of life article, but clearly are not in the standard of living article. As such, I am removing them. Vbscript2 (talk) 13:02, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

"Living Standard"
I got here trying to find out what an HTML "Living Standard" is (presumably some sort of standards document that isn't fixed, but changes over time?). Would a disambig be in order? Equinox ◑ 14:20, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 19 January 2021 and 6 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jack Corley.

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