Decent Living Standards: Material Prerequisites for Human Wellbeing

We define a set of universal, irreducible and essential set of material conditions for achieving basic human wellbeing, along with indicators and quantitative thresholds, which can be operationalized for societies based on local customs and preferences. We draw support for this decent living standard (DLS) from different accounts of basic justice, including the capability approach and basic needs. The DLS goes beyond existing multidimensional poverty indicators by comprehensively addressing living conditions and the means of social participation. The DLS offers a normative basis to develop minimum wage and reference budgets, and to assess the environmental impacts, such as climate change, of eradicating poverty.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Social Indicators Research

• Publication date

  2017-05-23

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Economics, Philosophy, Environmental Science, Sociology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/s11205-017-1650-0PMID 29950752PMCID 6013539
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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