It was chosen as a rough ballpark figure – what John Curtice, who helped come up with it, called a "best guess for an amount of money big enough to have impact on a person's material wellbeing, symbolic of an improvement in an individual's standard of living, but not so large as to completely override everything else".
Women's health, literacy, and material wellbeing are concerns of all women.
15 Sensitivity analyses were planned a priori using a few chosen groups to examine the effects of level of material wellbeing (developed v developing countries 16), study quality (see web extra appendix 2), youth (adolescence v adulthood), and race.
We have included conventional indicators of social class (education and occupation) and used a subjective rating of family financial strain as a proxy measure of material wellbeing.
For example, in the fourth century BC, Aristotle in Greece and Kautilya in India explored various possibilities of social choice in their classic books, Politics and Economics, respectively (the Sanskrit title of Kautilya's book, Arthashastra, translates literally as "the discipline of material wellbeing").
Further, the circumstances of families with Indigenous children (parenting quality, stress, family composition, overcrowding, household mobility, racism and family functioning) emerged as an important explanatory mechanism underpinning the relationship between child mental health and measures of material wellbeing such as carer employment status and family financial circumstances.
If your only measure of "good" is material wellbeing, then a China with a rising standard of living but no freedom is "better" than a desperately poor new democracy in Sierra Leone.
It was in the twentieth century, Ober says, that Greece had a population and material wellbeing comparable to the population and wealth of Greece of 2,300 years before.
