I found this an interesting framing, thank you! I hadn’t heard of the multidimensional poverty index before.
(1) Do you know how widely this measure is currently being used in e.g. development research, charity evaluation? I was kind of surprised at how specific some of the components of the index are (e.g. I imagine the below is kind of hard to straight forwardly calculate based on past surveys—not sure if all of these questions are standard to ask?).
Deprived if the household does not own more than one of these assets: radio, TV, telephone, computer, animal cart, bicycle, motorbike or refrigerator and does not own a car or truck.
(2) Minor point: I wonder if you will reach more of your intended audience by changing the title of this post to “The Capability Approach (to Improving Human Welfare)” or something. I initially pattern matched the word “capability” in this title onto something about AI, since I think on the EA forum folks talk more about capability in terms of AI systems than anything else.
The capability approach is widely used as a “north star” guiding much development practice and research. Amartya Sen has been very influential in this community. The MDPI is pretty new, but it has at least a little purchase at at the UNDP and World Bank, among others. It’s probably worth at this point reiterating that I’d say the MDPI is “capability inspired” rather than “the capability approach in practice.”
On the question of data: it’s the opposite. I’m quite confident that those questions were chosen because we have a reasonable amount of cross-country historical data on them thanks to the DHS surveys.
Title has been updated. Thank you! This didn’t occur to me.
I found this an interesting framing, thank you! I hadn’t heard of the multidimensional poverty index before.
(1) Do you know how widely this measure is currently being used in e.g. development research, charity evaluation? I was kind of surprised at how specific some of the components of the index are (e.g. I imagine the below is kind of hard to straight forwardly calculate based on past surveys—not sure if all of these questions are standard to ask?).
(2) Minor point: I wonder if you will reach more of your intended audience by changing the title of this post to “The Capability Approach (to Improving Human Welfare)” or something. I initially pattern matched the word “capability” in this title onto something about AI, since I think on the EA forum folks talk more about capability in terms of AI systems than anything else.
Glad the post was useful.
The capability approach is widely used as a “north star” guiding much development practice and research. Amartya Sen has been very influential in this community. The MDPI is pretty new, but it has at least a little purchase at at the UNDP and World Bank, among others. It’s probably worth at this point reiterating that I’d say the MDPI is “capability inspired” rather than “the capability approach in practice.”
On the question of data: it’s the opposite. I’m quite confident that those questions were chosen because we have a reasonable amount of cross-country historical data on them thanks to the DHS surveys.
Title has been updated. Thank you! This didn’t occur to me.