The Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) is an attempt to measure the quality of life or well-being of a country. The value is the average of three statistics: basic literacy rate, infant mortality, and life expectancy at age one, all equally weighted on a 0 to 100 scale.
It was developed for the Overseas Development Council in the mid-1970s by Morris David Morris, as one of a number of measures created due to dissatisfaction with the use of GNP as an indicator of development. PQLI might be regarded as an improvement but shares the general problems of measuring quality of life in a quantitative way. It has also been criticized because there is considerable overlap between infant mortality and life expectancy.
The UN Human Development Index is a more widely used means of measuring well-being.
Steps to Calculate Physical Quality of Life:
1) Find percentage of the population that is literate (literacy rate).
2) Find the infant mortality rate. (out of 1000 births) INDEXED Infant Mortality Rate = (166 - infant mortality) × 0.625
3) Find the Life Expectancy. INDEXED Life Expectancy = (Life expectancy - 42) × 2.7
4) Physical Quality of Life =
(Literacy Rate + INDEXED Infant Mortality Rate + INDEXED Life Expectancy) _________________________________________________________________________ 3Famous quotes containing the words physical, quality, life and/or index:
“Man’s characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body’s yoke, but is subject to that of society.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
“The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no.”
—Lester Bangs (1948–1982)
“For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrification of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion’s little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.”
—Caroline Lejeune (1897–1973)
“Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.”
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)