{"id":811,"date":"2026-10-28T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.feelnubia.com\/?p=811"},"modified":"2026-10-20T01:44:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T00:44:17","slug":"changing-the-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/blog-misc-and-opinions\/changing-the-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Sets the Rules? Rethinking Global Development Indices"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Quality of life cannot be measured by concrete streets, high rise buildings and access to technology alone (Imagined by LLM)<\/p><\/div>\r\n

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Are There Cultural Biases Built Into Global Development Indicators?<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n

Every now and then in my household, we disconnect the screens and encourage the children to entertain themselves. Invariably, my middle daughter invents a game that draws them all in. Trouble arrives the moment she starts to lose, because that is precisely when the rules change. If the initial rule made the person with the most beads the winner, a sudden reversal ensures she always comes out on top. Her powers of persuasion are formidable. Without adult intervention, she would run the show every time.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Watching them play recently, a thought struck me: who sets the rules in international relations? Because it seems that whoever designs the game consistently wins it. I can\u2019t prove that as a general law. I can show you where it happens.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

I <\/span>would like to <\/span>think <\/span>no <\/span>one sat down to rig it. They <\/span>should<\/span>n\u2019t need to. Indicators are built from what can be collected cheaply, compared across nearly every country, and shown to correlate with something that matters. But a convenient choice is still a choice, and it carries a picture of the good life along with it. Nobody needs to cheat when the rules are written from one side of the table, because the board already tilts. That is what I mean by power: the quiet advantage of deciding what counts.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Whose reality gets counted?<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

Why does income still sit at the centre of the dashboard? The Human Development Index added health and education to GDP per capita back in 1990, and it was a real advance. But when the question is poverty, the answer is still a dollar figure.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Why are agricultural indicators benchmarked against machinery, such as the tractors per 100 square kilometres of arable land in the World Bank\u2019s development indicators, rather than farmers and workers per 100 square kilometres, a measure that would tell a very different story in labour-abundant economies?<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In the <\/span>era of the <\/span>Millennium Development Goals <\/span>(MDGs)<\/span>, the standard indicator of women\u2019s economic standing was their share of wage employment outside agriculture. For hundreds of millions of women, agriculture is the very centre of their economic and social lives. Who decided that working outside it says more about a woman\u2019s status than working within it? The Sustainable Development Goals <\/span>(SDGs) shifted somewhat<\/span>: indicator 5.4.1 measures time spent on unpaid domestic and care work, the labour that holds households together and appears in no wage statistic. Credit where it is due. But it arrived in 2015, and time-use surveys are still far rarer than conventional labour force surveys. Invisibility, it turns out, takes a long time to repair.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Health indicators raise the same question. Why does skilled birth attendance, the measure behind SDG indicator 3.1.2, count doctors, nurses and midwives and leave out the traditional birth attendants whose knowledge has sustained communities for generations? Why does the family planning indicator, 3.7.1, count need satisfied with modern methods, and say nothing of the natural methods millions of women choose deliberately and use effectively? And why is there nothing on the intergenerational transmission of herbal medicine, or the reach of traditional healers into places no clinic serves? There are defensible reasons for the first two choices: modern methods and skilled attendants have a strong evidence base for saving lives. A defensible reason still leaves people uncounted.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Then there is the environment, where I expected to find nothing, <\/span>but<\/span> found something. The Red List Index tracks the extinction risk of species over time, which is close to the ratio of species thriving against species lost \u2013 <\/span>a measurement<\/span> I <\/span>am actually interested in <\/span>see<\/span>ing<\/span>. What no indicator captures is the ecological knowledge of communities that have lived in balance with their landscapes for generations. Governments are scored on whether biodiversity policies exist on paper. Nobody is scored on whether the knowledge that sustains biodiversity survives.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

While we are at it, s<\/span>hould mortality data not say something about the quality of death, including the growing reality in ageing societies of people dying alone, without community or kin? Should social indicators not weigh the community care of elders and the strength of extended family networks alongside delinquency and crime?<\/span><\/p>\r\n

These are not minor methodological quibbles. They are questions about power: about whose reality gets measured, and whose gets rendered invisible. If the development community set its indicators against genuinely humane parameters, ones that measured human flourishing rather than the throughput of systems, I suspect the rankings would look very different. Nobody has run that experiment at scale, and I doubt that is an accident. We might even stumble on the accidental bonus of improving the human condition.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Nor is this a fringe view. Amartya Sen\u2019s capabilities approach, the Human Development Index, the multidimensional poverty measures now published alongside income figures, and the 2009 Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission on measuring social progress all grew out of the same dissatisfaction. The real question is why such ideas are still treated as supplements rather than foundations?<\/span><\/p>\r\n

There is a harder question underneath, and the usual reform does not touch it. The usual answer to an invisible thing is to build an indicator for it. But some things may resist counting. A good death, a community\u2019s ecological memory, the worth of a grandmother\u2019s presence in a household: turn each into a score and we may have kept the assumption that only the countable is real, and merely lengthened the list. I don\u2019t know the answer. I do think the question belongs in the room.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The poverty line, up close<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

The SDGs were adopted in 2015 as the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, and the framework of indicators was settled by 2017. The first goal is to end poverty in all its forms, and its first indicator, 1.1.1, is the proportion of the population living below the international poverty line. That line has a history worth knowing.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The dollar-a-day line appeared in the World Bank\u2019s 1990 World Development Report. It was set at about $1 in 1985 purchasing power parity terms, as the typical national poverty line of the world\u2019s poorest countries. As new price data arrived, the Bank revised it: $1.08 with 1993 prices, $1.25 with 2005 prices, $1.90 with 2011 prices, and $2.15 with 2017 prices. In June 2025, using 2021 prices, it became $3.00, set at the median of the national poverty lines of low-income countries. <\/span>I guess poverty adjusts itself only to the dollar.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

It is tempting to read this as inflation adjustment, a bar held constant in real terms, and the Bank itself described the 2022 revision as leaving the line\u2019s real value virtually unchanged, simply expressed in new prices. The latest one was different. By the Bank\u2019s own account the line rose by some 40 percent, more than price movements alone explain, because several low-income countries raised their national poverty lines after improving their household surveys. Each revision re-derives the line from national poverty lines expressed in a new round of price surveys, and the answer can move a lot. The June 2025 update combined new price data, a new line and fresh household surveys, which partly offset one another (about 45 million fewer people in South Asia, more in every other region). The net result was an upward revision of roughly 125 million people in the 2022 estimate, from about 713 million to about 838 million. No harvest failed in the meantime. No wages fell. Part of what changed was the ruler. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

The Bank has been open about its method, and I credit it for that. But openness about a method is not neutrality about its premises. The Atkinson Commission on Global Poverty had advised against updating the line with new price data before 2030, because poverty counts swung so sharply when new rounds arrived. The Bank said it would follow that advice unless the price surveys had stabilised over at least two rounds, and it later judged that bar met at global and regional level, while acknowledging large changes for some individual countries. The line has since been updated twice. My own view, offered as opinion, is that a headline number which moves by well over a hundred million people on a change of ruler should be read with that in mind, and reported with its uncertainty as prominently as its size.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

It is also worth remembering what a headcount does not say. It tells you how many people fall below the line, not how far below. The Bank now also reports higher lines of $4.20 and $8.30 for middle-income countries, and a relative \u201csocietal poverty\u201d measure that rises with national income. Those are improvements. They also took a long time to arrive.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

A common complaint is that when African currencies fall against the dollar, the poverty line shifts. That is the wrong target. Purchasing power parities <\/span>(PPPs) <\/span>exist precisely to strip out market exchange rates and compare what money buys in each country. The real vulnerability lies elsewhere. PPPs depend on price surveys carried out by the International Comparison Program every few years, using standardised baskets that may poorly represent how subsistence and rural households actually live. The most recent round, for 2021, was released in 2024.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The vulnerability is sharper where the underlying data <\/span>is<\/span> thin. In announcing the June 2025 update, the Bank said it had sufficient survey coverage to report estimates through 2023 for the world and every region except Sub-Saharan Africa, where coverage is particularly thin in West Africa for want of recent data from Nigeria. It is also the region where the largest share of extreme poverty <\/span>allegedly <\/span>persists. Where surveys are infrequent, estimates must lean more on modelling, and models inherit the assumptions of whoever built them. It does not take a prophet to see the risk: a continent whose reality cannot be captured in the form the indicator demands will be described by estimates rather than evidence, and then ranked on them. No prizes for guessing how that league table ends.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

What a dollar line cannot capture<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

How is a daily standard of living actually assessed? The better household surveys do try to include the imputed value of food grown and eaten on the family farm, which is a real improvement over cash income alone. But the value is assigned at market prices. A meal of yams, vegetables and protein from family land and a processed ready-meal from a supermarket may register as equivalent, or the supermarket meal as higher, though the farm meal may be better in nutrition, ecological footprint and social setting. <\/span>P<\/span>rice is not a measure of quality. Does food only count when it has passed through a till?<\/span><\/p>\r\n

And how do we measure the daily value of the grandmother who provides full-time childcare, enabling her daughter to return to school, run a small trade or work a plot of land? Her contribution is enormous and entirely real. It appears in neither national accounts nor household consumption.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The same blind spot affects Target 1.3, which calls for nationally appropriate social protection systems, and its indicator 1.3.1, the share of the population covered by them. The indicator tracks pensions, benefits and formal safety nets. It has no place for family-based welfare: the grandmother living with her children and grandchildren, whose wellbeing may be better than it would be in an institution, and who at the same time eases the burden on public systems. An indicator that rewards only formal coverage can nudge policy toward formal coverage, whether or not that <\/span>actually ]<\/span>serves people better.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Now the argument I most want to make is the logical consequence of indicators designed within a particular civilisational framework, one that defines progress as the movement of individuals from informal, community-embedded arrangements toward formal, monetised, state-mediated ones. Within that framework, the informal sector is always a problem to be solved rather than a resource to be understood. Traditional knowledge is always <\/span>treated <\/span>an absence of professional expertise. The extended family is <\/span>seen as<\/span> a gap in formal provision rather than a social achievement. I believe the extended family is often both cheaper than state provision and more humane in its expression. That is a c<\/span>all <\/span>for evidence, not a verdict, and I would welcome the research that tests it.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The framework has defenders, and they have a serious case. Feminist economists point out that informal care falls overwhelmingly on women, and that the formal systems the indicators reward were won, in part, to relieve them. That deserves an answer, not a shrug. My answer is that it argues for measuring both, not for treating one as progress and the other as residue.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Which brings me to questions the architects of these indicators should be required to answer before the next round is written. What can we learn from the decades-long shift of welfare from the family to the state in the West, and from the shift in loyalty and social architecture that came with it? What does the American experience of moving responsibility for child-rearing and social formation from families to institutions tell us about where that road leads, for better and for worse? These are not rhetorical questions. Societies that have been told to follow that road deserve an honest accounting.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The window has closed, but the game is not over<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

The indicators are no longer under consultation. They are written, and they are reviewed periodically. With 2030 less than four years away, the rules for whatever follows will have to be drafted soon. That is the next chance to ask what a measuring stick would look like if it were designed from the start with the realities of the world\u2019s <\/span>more traditional <\/span>and most overlooked communities in mind.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

If we do not ask, the results are already apparent. A game whose rules are written by one player, measuring outcomes that only that player\u2019s strategy can optimise, is not a measure of who is developing and who is not. It is a measure of who wrote the rules. And a game that predictable after a while, <\/span>becomes <\/span>excruciating to watch.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

It is time to engage these questions seriously, publicly, and before the next window closes. The big question, the one that should sit at the centre of every conversation about development indicators, is deceptively simple:<\/span><\/p>\r\n

How culturally neutral are these indicators, and who gets to decide?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

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  Are There Cultural Biases Built Into Global Development Indicators? Every now and then in my household, we disconnect the screens and encourage the children to entertain themselves. Invariably, my middle daughter invents a game that draws them all in. Trouble arrives the moment she starts to lose, because that is precisely when the rules […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[77,316,336,369,441,443,492,493,1563,708,848,907,1101,1194],"class_list":["post-811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-misc-and-opinions","tag-africa","tag-cost-of-living","tag-culture","tag-dollar","tag-feel","tag-feelnubia","tag-gap","tag-gdp","tag-iq","tag-line","tag-nubia","tag-poverty","tag-test","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4512,"href":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions\/4512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feelnubia.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}