Human Development
Development of the quality of human life
Description:
Underlying the concern for human development in both industrially developed and developing societies is the question of quality of life. It has been customary to use crude economic indices like the gross national product in order to measure social progress and human welfare. The concern for quality of life represents an attempt to find complementary elements or correctives which include such (national and international) criteria as: distributive justice, participation in decision-making, community life, and spiritual welfare. However, the measurement of these is exceedingly difficult. A more fully human perspective is required to integrate these values into national and international planning.Quality of life requires that every person have the right to live a meaningful life in which he or she can develop his or her own personality as a socially responsible human being. Each person has the right to a minimum of material requirements necessary to such a life. Social structures necessary to achieve quality of life differ widely in different countries and are only capable of comparison in terms of patterns of relationships between resources, hopes, possibilities and actual achievements. However, both the quantitative and qualitative components of the concept convey intricate relationships between the basic human needs of persons and the human aspirations of persons to reach their full development.
Beyond meeting the basic human needs which all human beings require and which can be quantified, the criteria for a higher quality of life can only be stated in general terms:
1. New forms of community life which will replace the present compartmentalized form of technological industrialization, emphasizing, on the one hand, new patterns of home, work, school, church, citizenship, recreation, and on the other, a new appreciation of the traditional restrictions of rural life. These new patterns of community should provide for close relationships among generations, a place for the unmarried and the widowed, the widening of affection and emotional support, care of the young, the weak and the old, conservation of resources and energy, equal participation of women and members of different racial and ethnic groups, sharing of burdens and responsibility of each for each and each for all.
2. Structures which permit children to develop the capacity to participate in societies as whole human beings.
3. Productive processes that are resource and energy conserving, and as closely tied as economically feasible to local resource, local use and local skill.
4. Opportunities for creativity, innovation and the realization of potentialities, beginning at the local community level and extending to the global community.
5. The fullest attainable participation of all members of society in appropriate levels of decision-making.
6. Recognition of different cultural and linguistic values and structural provisions for freedom of choice among them, consonant with the well-being of the wider community.
7. Social structures which, while encouraging peoples of each nation to devote themselves to the preservation of their land, their people, their cultural traditions and their descendants, help at the same time to increase awareness of the interdependence of all countries.
Related:
Standard of living