A Poset-Generalizability Method for Human Development Indicators

Abstract

The paper introduces a poset-generalizability perspective for analysing human development indicators. It suggests a new method for identifying admissibility of different informational spaces and criteria in human development analysis. From its inception, the Capability Approach has argued for informational pluralism in normative evaluations. But in practice, it has turned its back to other (non-capability) informational spaces for being imperfect, biased or incomplete and providing a mere evidential role in normative evaluations. This paper offers the construction of a proper method to overcome this shortcoming. It combines tools from poset analysis and generalizability theory to put forward a systematic categorization of cases with different informational spaces. It provides illustrations by using key informational spaces, namely, resources, rights, subjective well-being and capabilities. The offered method is simpler and more concrete than mere human development guidelines and at the same time it avoids results based on automatic calculations. The paper concludes with implications for human development policies and an agenda for further work.

Some Critical Reflections on the Measurement of Social Sustainability and Well-Being in Complex Societies

“…Indeed, the relevance of partial orders in social measurement is rooted in their capacity of capturing both the vertical dimension (comparability) and horizontal dimension (incomparability) of social phenomena. The first is linked to the concept of "intensity", the second to their multi-faceted nature, to be considered as a key feature to be preserved in their description, rather than as a form of noise to be discarded (for examples of applications in this spirit, see [20,[24][25][26]). q q q q q q q q 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q 1 2 3 q q q q q q q q 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q 1 2 3 4 The use of partial orders in social measurement is an example of the Representational Theory of Measurement, introduced at the beginning of the paper.…”