Assessing development: designing better indices of poverty and gender equity

We will work toward new indices - of poverty and of gender equity - applicable both at national/supranational levels and to smaller groups affected by some specific policy or program. Both indices will draw on a holistic measure of individual (dis)advantage that reflects all relevant aspects of a persons situation. We will tackle head-on the value judgments inevitably involved in index construction through a combination of ethical reflection and close attention to the actual situations and judgments of disadvantaged people themselves. New indices are needed because current ones, such as those used by the United Nations Development Programme, contain serious flaws that create incentives to misallocate sparse human-development resources.