First up is Mayor Bloomberg’s recent announcement of a new way to measure poverty in New York City. Using the new Bloomberg gauge, 23 percent of New Yorkers are classified as poor; under the standard federal poverty measure, 19 percent are. What accounts for the difference?
Our aim with the American Human Development Project is to introduce to our own country an international approach and tool for measuring human well-being that we’ve seen used around the world with great success – the human development approach and the human development index. Human development is, in the words of Amartya Sen, about “advancing the richness of human life” and expanding the opportunities, choices, and freedoms of ordinary people. With our book, The Measure of America, and this website, we hope to stimulate fact-based public dialogue and debate about human development here at home.