Open mind, society, and world

IIASA researcher Anastasia Aldelina Lijadi will present a recent paper entitled "Years of Good Life (YoGL): A well-being indicator tailored for serving as sustainable development criterion" at this conference. The paper was developed in the framework of the "The Demography of Sustainable Human Wellbeing" project, that is led by World Population Program Director Wolfgang Lutz, who won the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant in 2017. The project aims to make an unconventional cross-disciplinary contribution to advancing the discussion around and search for broadly acceptable and empirically measurable quantitative indicators of socioeconomic progress and long-term human well-being that can serve as criteria for judging sustainable development.

Dr. Lijadi will have four contributions at this conference:

1. Symposium: Psychology of Harmonization: Well-being, Quality of Life and Sustainable Development in Cross-Cultural Perspectives
   Presentation title: Years of Good Life (YoGL): a well-being indicator tailored for serving as sustainable development criterion
   2. Symposium: Quality of life, Wellbeing and Personality
   Presentation title: Sustaining quality of life: Narrative from self-initiated repatriated families with third culture kid
   3. Symposium: Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among World
   Presentation title: My Home is Here and Everywhere: Voice of Third Culture Kids
   4. Poster title: Collage Life Story Elicitation Technique: Creating space for children voice 

For more information please visit the event website.

Abstract

Years of Good Life (YoGL): A well-being indicator tailored for serving as sustainable development criterion

Wolfgang Lutz, Erich Stressnich, Anna Dimitrova, Anastasia A. Lijadi, Claudia Reiter, Sonja Spitzer & Dilek Yildiz

The sustainable wellbeing of all human population groups today and in the future is the overarching goal of sustainable development (SD) as defined by the Brundtland Commission and as enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To assess whether progress in this direction is being made, large numbers of quantitative indicators have been defined by various organizations and scientists. These indicators either cover certain partial aspects of SD or try to give weighted averages of a broad range of aspects, which typically can only be assessed for the past but not modelled for the future. Yet, sustainability science calls for a comprehensive indicator of human wellbeing (W) that can both be empirically assessed and modelled in its future trends as a function of influencing factors, including possible feedbacks from environmental change. Here we propose a tailor-made indicator to serve precisely this purpose following the specification of six explicit criteria that should be met. Years of Good Life (YoGL) is based on the fact that in order to be able to enjoy any quality of life, one has to be alive. But since mere survival is not considered as good enough, life years are counted conditional on meeting minimum standards in three objective dimensions (being out of absolute poverty and enjoying physical and cognitive health) and in the subjective dimension of life satisfaction. We present the theoretical foundations, discuss the data requirements and methods for calculating the indicator and illustrate its application to populations at different stages of development.