PHA-Exch> Food for a non-money-metric thought (2)

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: George Kent <kent at hawaii.edu>

I believe the single best indicator of the quality of life is child
mortality. I examined it in detail in a 1995 book called *Children in the
International Political Economy*, showing for example, that year after year,
the number of child deaths has been far higher than the number of deaths due
to armed conflict. Yet child mortality gets very little attention.

In the book (pp. 33-34) I described a calculation based on the data
available at that time:

/quote/
Even with the best of care the children's mortality rate can never be
reduced to zero. In 1991 the lowest rate in the world was in Sweden where
there were only five deaths of children under five years of age for every
thousand children born. If the world's resources were fully devoted to
minimizing children's mortality, presumably the children's mortality rate
could be reduced to about five everywhere. But that is a very demanding
standard. It is quite reasonable, however, to suggest that if our worldwide
priorities called for it, the worldwide average children's mortality rate
could be reduced to, say, 10 per thousand live births. In 1991, twenty one
countries had children's mortality rates of 10 or less.

If the children's mortality rate had been 10 for all countries in 1991,
children's deaths would have numbered 1,410,000. This can be taken as a
conservative estimate of the "minimum possible" number of children's deaths.
The actual estimated number of children's deaths for 1991 was 12,821,000.
The difference, 11,411,000, can be taken as a reasonable estimate of the
number of "unnecessary" or excessive children's deaths. Thus about 89
percent of the total number of deaths of children under five were
"unnecessary" or excessive.
/unquote

If similar calculations were done with the data available today, I suspect
we would find that there has been little or no reduction in the rate at
which children die unnecessarily.

As Woodward  points out, money-poverty is a very ambiguous indicator or the
quality of life. Health-poverty, measured with a focus on child mortality,
would be much more meaningful. National level child mortality data are
readily available to us, and unambiguous. Like all global data, they are
imperfect, but I think that for measuring the quality of life, they are the
best we've got.
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