EFFECT OF STANDARD OF LIVING

Standard of living is generally measured by standards such as real (i.e. inflation

adjusted) income per person and poverty rate. Other measures such as access and
quality of health care, income growth inequality and educational standards are also
used. Examples are access to certain goods (such as number of refrigerators per 1000
people), or measures of health such as life expectancy. It is the ease by which people
living in a time or place are able to satisfy their wants.
The idea of a 'standard' may be contrasted with the quality of life, which takes into
account not only the material standard of living, but also other more intangible aspects
that make up human life, such as leisure, safety, cultural resources, social life, physical
health, environmental quality issues etc. More complex means of measuring well-being
must be employed to make such judgments, and these are very often political, thus
controversial. Even between two nations or societies that have similar material
standards of living, quality of life factors may in fact make one of these places more
attractive to a given individual or group.
However, there can be problems even with just using numerical averages to compare
material standards of living, as opposed to, for instance, a Pareto index (a measure of
the breadth of income or wealth distribution). Standards of living are perhaps inherently
subjective. As an example, countries with a very small, very rich upper class and a very
large, very poor lower class may have a high mean level of income, even though the
majority of people have a low "standard of living". This mirrors the problem of poverty
measurement, which also tends towards the relative. This illustrates how distribution of
income can disguise the actual Standard of living.
Likewise Country A, a perfectly socialist country with very low average per capita
income would receive a higher score for having lower income inequality than Country B
with a higher income inequality, even if the bottom of Country B's population distribution
had a higher per capita income than Country A. Real examples of this include former
East Germany compared to former West Germany or North Korea compared to South
Korea. In each case, the socialist country has a low income descrepancy (and therefore
would score high in that regard), but lower per capita incomes than a large majority of
their neighboring counterpart. This can be avoided by using the measure of income at
various percentiles of the population rather than the highly relative and controversial
income inequality.
 EFFECTOF THE TECHNOLOGY AND THE
ENVIRONMENT
The energy production (via power plants and coal burning) that is needed to support
human life is increasing the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which
can lead to rising global temperatures. The more automobiles in use on the planet also
contribute to the pollution problem and the injection of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. Some scientists fear that global warming will lead to rising sea levels and
extreme weather conditions in the future. In order to support the growing population,
forests are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Many countries are constantly cutting
down their forests to clear land for farming and to make room for housing.
The huge increases in size of the human population have resulted in a substantial
degradation of environmental conditions. The changes have largely been characterized
by deforestation, unsustainable harvesting of potentially renewable resources (such as
wild animals and plants that are of economic importance), rapid mining of non-
renewable resources (such as metals and fossil fuels), pollution, and other ecological
damages.
At the same time that human populations have been increasing, there has also been a
great intensification of per-capita environmental impacts. This has occurred through the
direct and indirect consequences of increased resource use to sustain individual human
beings and their social and technological infrastructure: meat production, fuel-burning,
mining, air and water pollution, destruction of wild habitat, and so forth.

This trend can be illustrated by differences in the intensity of energy use among human
societies, which also reflect the changes occurring during the history of the evolution of
sociocultural systems. The average per-capita consumption of energy in a hunting
society is about 20 megajoules (millions of joules) per day (MJ/d), while it is 48 MJ/d in
a primitive agricultural society, 104 MJ/d in advanced agriculture, 308 MJ/d for an
industrializing society, and 1025 MJ/d for an advanced industrial society. The increases
of per-capita energy usage, and of per-capita environmental impact, have been
especially rapid during the past century of vigorous technological discoveries and
economic growth.
In fact, global per-capita economic productivity and energy consumption have both
increased more rapidly during the twentieth century than has the human population.
This pattern has been most significant in industrialized countries. In 1980, the average
citizen of an industrialized country utilized 199 gigajoules (GJ, billions of joules) of
energy, compared with only 17 GJ/yr in less-developed countries. Although
industrialized countries only had 25% of the human population, they accounted for 80%
of the energy use by human beings in 1980. Another illuminating comparison is that the
world's richest 20% of people consume 86% of the goods and services delivered by the
global economy, while the poorest 20% consumes just 1.3%. More specifically, the
United States—the world's richest country as measured on a net, though not on a per-
capita, basis—consumes approximately 25% of the world's natural resources and
produces some 75% of its hazardous wastes and 22% of its greenhouse gas emissions,
while having only about 4.5% of the world's population.
One of the most current and widely discussed factor which could lead to the ultimate
end of existence of Earth and man is global warming and its devastating effects.
Scientists have asked how fast the Earth is heating up, and how the warming effects on
Earth may affect crops and climatic conditions. Several current trends clearly
demonstrate that global warming is directly impacting on; rising sea levels, the melting
of icecaps, and significant worldwide climatic changes. This paper will discuss the
degree of destruction caused by global warming, contributing factors to warming, and
finally, discuss what we can do to decrease the current rate of global warming. I would
also like to present opposing viewpoints to the effects of the warming process. In my
understanding, global warming represents a fundamental threat to all living things on
earth.