The quality of life (QoL) index is a well‐known measurement schedule to compare citizens' life facilities across countries of the world. Based on rational and factual parameters…
Abstract
Purpose
The quality of life (QoL) index is a well‐known measurement schedule to compare citizens' life facilities across countries of the world. Based on rational and factual parameters such as gross national product and gender equity, it has to be reinforced with psychological aspects like those observed in customer satisfaction and total quality management. This paper aims to document a QoL study on health area that focused on validating its theoretical role as an attribute of sustainability, itself one of the two Makovian reverse processes in the political system.
Design/methodology/approach
The different attributes of the QoL were studied from the research literature, elaborating a structure of these elements. For a second approach, citizens were interviewed about their QoL perception, with the “voice of the customer” method, as was done in quality practice from companies to catch customer needs and expectations.
Findings
The application shows confusions between QoL, wellbeing, health, happiness and liberty, inducing the research to analyse its effects in the sustainability and the policy definitions. This paper presents the place of sustainability and safety in political systems with a Markov model description.
Practical implications
The impact of QoL's variability perception in the instability of political systems incites politicians to better understand sustainability and safety processes functioning, in order to improve the political system, and avoid spending time on designing short term answers to citizens' dissatisfaction with a lack of mastery.
Originality/value
Learning from technology and industry history allows us to understand that growing complexity in these systems and conduces to abandon linear models and adopt cross reverse differential ones such as Markov. By analogy with human beings, in the paper the aggregation method and Markov model describe QoL's place in sustainability and political systems.
Details
Keywords
This is the second part of a long investigation under the title of, Principia Oeconomica; the first having appeared in this journal in 1986. The substance of the argument in this…
Abstract
This is the second part of a long investigation under the title of, Principia Oeconomica; the first having appeared in this journal in 1986. The substance of the argument in this contribution is in the form of a dialogue with Henri Guitton, member of l'Institut de France and author of a book in French, De l'Imperfection en Economie (1979). Guitton is leading a new French Economic School critical of a modern economy characterised by ‘Econosm” or “Economy of Counter‐sense”. Economism refers to the practice of conceiving problems of a modern society in strictly economic‐accounting terms and neglecting a host of social and human aspects. The second term means that the sole attention given to growth in production did not increase the happiness of man but on the contrary it created for him new problems (pollution, noise, atomic radiation and other hazards). To cope with these problems, the French school recommends wise policies which Guitton called “creative imperfection”. Guitton's presentation is followed step by step, with an interpretation in terms of stable equilibrium. The recommendation stresses structural reforms to solve the same problems but following a road of “creative perfection” leading to the same goal sought by Guitton: a better world of tomorrow.