Quality of Life and Standard of Living

How do we compare economies?

When we are trying to rate the features of our different economic systems, we often ask the question, Which one is better?  The answer depends on what you are trying to measure.  Quality of life and standard of living are two different tools we can use to try to answer this question.

Standard of Living

This is a measure of economic well-being.  Standard of living can easily be measured by adding up the monetary value of our possessions and our jobs.  In Canada, we can express measurements of standard of living in dollars and cents and we can rate our standard of living by using statistics like average income, average number of vehicles, money spent of entertainment, etc.  All factors that affect standard of living can be measured with a price tag and can be bought and sold.

Quality of Life

This is more difficult to measure than standard of living since it includes economic, social, physical, political, and spiritual well-being.  How we rate our quality of life may be different for each individual since many of the factors deal with personal beliefs or ideologies.

While quality of life and standard of living are not the same, they are somewhat related.  Standard of living is one of the factors one would include when evaluating quality of life; however, it is not true to say that quality of life always increases when standard of living rises.  We can tell many stories of unhappy billionaires to make the case that quality of life includes many more factors than standard of living.

Below is a diagram that summarizes the relationship between standard of living and quality of life.

Further Reading

1.  Click here to read an argument posted by the Employment Policy Foundation claiming that the American standard of living is increasing, 

2.  Click here to go to the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies homepage.

3.  Click here to go to the Quality of Life Project created by M. Amoruso from Calgary Catholic Schools