Wednesday, September 7, 2011

quality of life tests

News of the day tends to focus on one layer of organization at a time, whether it be e.g. public health, family life, the state of the economy, or cultural beliefs.  When you are only thinking about one layer at at time, it's often easy to cartoonify things in terms e.g. of good guys and bad guys.

Life's quality of course involves simplification, but it also involves subsystem-correlations that look in and out from the physical boundaries of skin, family and culture.  Folks who are greedy on one layer (e.g. in their job) may be acting prudently on another (e.g. for their family).  Hence multi-layer thinking about community health is more likely to be about the balance between different (and sometimes competing) perspectives than it is about good versus bad.

How can we: (i) track what we can know about the health of all six of these correlation layers, and moreover (ii) use that information to optimize quality of life across the board?  This might make for some fun (and constructive) regional competitions in the process.

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