The “Column-First” Approach to the Measurement of Social Well-Being and Deprivation

Owing to data limitations, applied work on the measurement of social well-being often uses a procedure, which is different from the one introduced in Chaps. 6 and 7 : it first aggregates the achievements of individuals in terms of each separate attribute to get the society’s achievement in terms of each attribute separately and then aggregates the society’s achievements in terms of the different attributes to reach an assessment of the society’s well-being. The chapter discusses some limitations of this procedure.