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Standard of living refers to the level of wealth, happiness, comfort, material goods and necessities available to a certain socioeconomic class in a certain geographic area. The standard of living includes factors such as income, quality and availability of employment, class disparity, poverty rate, quality and affordability of housing, hours of work required to purchase necessities, gross domestic product, inflation rate, number of vacation days per year, affordable (or free) access to quality healthcare, quality and availability of education, life expectancy, incidence of disease, cost of goods and services, infrastructure, national economic growth, economic and political stability, political and religious freedom, environmental quality, climate and safety. The standard of living is closely related to quality of life.^[1]

Standard of living is generally measured by standards such as real (i.e. inflation adjusted) income per person and poverty rate. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, income growth inequality, Disposable Energy (people's disposable income's ability to buy energy) and educational standards are also used. Examples are access to certain goods (such as number of refrigerators per 1000 people), or measures of health such as life expectancy. It is the ease by which people living in a time or place are able to satisfy their needs and/or wants.^{[citation needed]}

The idea of a 'standard' may be contrasted with the quality of life, which takes into account not only the material standard of living, but also other more intangible aspects that make up human life, such as leisure, safety, cultural resources, social life, physical health, environmental quality issues, etc. More complex means of measuring well-being must be employed to make such judgements, and these are very often political, thus controversial. Even between two nations or societies that have similar material standards of living, quality of life factors may in fact make one of these places more attractive to a given individual or group.

However, there can be problems even with just using numerical averages to compare material standards of living, as opposed to, for instance, a Pareto index (a measure of the breadth of income or wealth distribution). Standards of living are perhaps inherently subjective. As an example, countries with a very small, very rich upper class and a very large, very poor lower class may have a high mean level of income, even though the majority of people have a low "standard of living". This mirrors the problem of poverty measurement, which also tends towards the relative. This illustrates how distribution of income can disguise the actual standard of living.

Likewise Country A, a perfectly state capitalist country with a planned economy with very low average per capita income would receive a higher score for having lower income inequality than Country B with a higher income inequality, even if the bottom of Country B's population distribution had a higher per capita income than Country A. Real examples of this include former East Germany compared to former West Germany or North Korea compared to South Korea. In each case, the state capitalist country has a low income discrepancy (and therefore would score high in that regard), but lower per capita incomes than a large majority of their neighboring counterpart. This can be avoided by using the measure of income at various percentiles of the population rather than a highly relative and controversial overall income inequality measure.

See also[link]

• Cost of living
• Gini coefficient
• Human Development Index
• Median household income
• Right to an adequate standard of living

References[link]

External links[link]

• Industrial Revolution and the Standard of Living by Freddy Madero

Moshe Milevsky^[1] is an Associate Professor in Finance at the Schulich School of Business at York University, Canada. He graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics and Physics from Yeshiva University in 1990 and worked as an actuarial intern at TIAA-CREF in New York. He then continued his education and graduated with a M.A. in Mathematics and Statistics from York University in 1992. In 1996, he was awarded a Ph.D in Business Finance from York University where he has been teaching since.^[2]

His area of expertise is in mathematical financial economics. He has done extensive research on exotic option pricing, quantitative personal financial planning (focusing on investment strategies for retiring individuals), insurance derivatives, and alternative paradigms for risk quantification and measurement of long-term financial market investment returns.^[3]

He is also the Executive Director of the IFID Centre, a non-profit corporation dedicated to generating advanced research at the intersection of wealth management, personal finance, and insurance.^[4] For his contributions to the Fields Institute and to the Canadian mathematical community, Moshe was inducted as a Fields Institute Fellow in 2002.^[5]

Moshe Milevsky is the author of several books, including the popular Are You a Stock or a Bond, which helps a person evaluate all the opportunities and risks in a person’s life, and the more advanced The Calculus of Retirement Income, which summarizes much of the research that Milevsky has done on quantitative personal financial planning.^[6]

Selected books[link]

• Milevsky, Moshe (2010). Your Money Milestones: A Guide to Making the 9 Most Important Financial Decisions of Your Life. Upper Saddle River: FT Press. ISBN 0-13-702910-1. 
• Milevsky, Moshe; Alexandra Macqueen (2010). Pensionize Your Nest Egg: How to Use Product Allocation to Create a Guaranteed Income for Life. Mississauga: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-470-68099-7. 
• Milevsky, Moshe (2008). Are You a Stock or a Bond?: Create Your Own Pension Plan for a Secure Financial Future. Upper Saddle River: FT Press. ISBN 0-13-712737-5. 
• Milevsky, Moshe (2006). The Calculus of Retirement Income: Financial Models for Pension Annuities and Life Insurance. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-84258-1. 
• Milevsky, Moshe; Michael Posner (1999). Money Logic: Financial Strategies for the Serious Investor. Toronto: Stoddart. ISBN 0-7737-3171-7. 

References[link]

1. ^ http://www.yorku.ca/milevsky/
2. ^ http://www.schulich.yorku.ca/ssb-extra/faculty.nsf/d3344026438b8e3885256b1800688b5c/e1e3b5d6e2fa4ba685256b180068b78a?OpenDocument#
3. ^ http://www.schulich.yorku.ca/ssb-extra/faculty.nsf/d3344026438b8e3885256b1800688b5c/e1e3b5d6e2fa4ba685256b180068b78a?OpenDocument#
4. ^ http://www.ifid.ca/
5. ^ http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/fieldsinstitutefellows/index.html
6. ^ http://www.ifid.ca/cri.htm