Is quality of life measurable?

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Is quality of life measurable?

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This is a very important problem, because it has ramifications on whether we can track and compare progress, find correlations

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The two competing elements are:

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  1. It certainly feels like some life is better than another life, and when you ask a specific question you usually get a measurable attribute (Would you rather be educated or not? Would you rather live to 50 or to 70? Would you rather have disease or not?)
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  1. It also feels like concrete measurements that show increases in important attributes miss a certain costs and certain difficulties that may be newer. (might need to find a stronger version of this point)
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My current suspicion is that 2 is weaker than 1, and that looking on a life we haven’t lived in history makes it easier to think that life was not that bad. The symmetric problem exists, where perhaps it was a much better life in the past, but if those two cancel each other out then the data points to significant improvement over time in many aspects of life quality.

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