Yes :)

Ademilade Olubambi Thanks so much

No. That's too simplistic.

Rather, everyone should be able to meet all of their needs, through a combination of paid and unpaid work, in 24 hours per day per person.

In Canada, people use:

• about 10 h/d per person in unpaid activities to meet personal needs. This includes rest, self-care, eating, etc.
• about 5 h/d in unpaid activities to meet family needs. This includes cooking, cleaning, child care, care for the elderly and infirm, etc.
• a little less than 2 h/d in paid activities to meet needs from the community. This include education, health care, governance, security.
• a little more than 1/2 h/d in unpaid activities to meet needs from the community. This includes volunteering as a youth leader, coach or the like.
• about 4 1/2 h/d in unpaid activities to meet personal and family wants. This includes watching TV, going out to the bar, etc.
• about 2 h/d in paid activities to meet wants from the community. This includes working at a cinema, selling ice cream, etc.

If you're focused only on paid employment, you're missing most of what people do to have a high quality of life. At the very least, paid employment occupies about 1/7 of people's lives, and it has the least direct influence on their quality of life. Sure, it can help others in the community, but that's not the point.

Even though people are using that time to meet needs, doesn't mean it is being used effectively. There will be obstructions in the self, family, and/or community that prevent people from being able to meet all of their needs, at least some of their time. Human Development would identify and remove those obstructions, and thus increase the freedoms, choices, and capabilities of the population.

As people find more of their needs are met using less time, they will be able to invest their available time in education and other productivity enhancements, and be able to sell more of their time at a higher value. So the employment thing is the indicator of a symptom of needs being met - it shouldn't be taken as the unit of measurement.

Douglas Nuttall Great replay , thanks so much, i would like to ask you which indicators i should evaluate in that case, i'm talking about a community that the unemployment rate is very hight and the economic system is not balanced because 80% of the active people are working in administrations and services where 01% are working in agriculture, knowing that agriculture was the first important conomical activity before . I have also talked about the necessity of making available some partial time work .

I should mention that work time is about 8h/day in our country , i think that the rest is enough to do something else, like watching TV, relax, staying with family etc.

I'm an engineer. As such, I think of measurements as the means to design a system, and indicators as the means to manage a system. But the indicators have to be developed by the system designer in conjunction with the system manager - neither can do it alone.

I would measure the system of people of the community - I would determine how effectively people use their time to meet their needs directly, and how efficiently people use their time to convert resources into the means to meet their needs. To do that, I would produce a robust list of needs, and take it to the community to ask them:

• what are the boundaries of these needs,
• what activities they undertake to meet those needs
• what are the symptoms of unmet needs (I think chronic stress is common in all unmet needs)

Then, I would collect data from the community. Determine the time use at activities expected to meet needs, per capita household ecological footprint (in each biome), and presence or absence of symptoms of unmet needs. Determine the biocapacity of the community in each biome.

For each need, I would then compile the time used at activities expected to meet the need, for those people with and without symptoms of the need being unmet. That can be converted into a value of effectiveness.

Efficiency would come from time use to meet needs plotted against ecological footprint.

From that, one can calculate the time use to meet needs throughout the community, the time that would be used to meet needs as if all over-consumed resources have ceased to be available, and the time that would be used to meet needs as if all needs were being met, and all over consumed resources have ceased to be available. This is the measure in absolute terms of the sustainability of the community. If it is less than 24h/d/ca, the community has the potential to be sustainable. If this value is less than 24h/d/ca for each identifiable subset of the community, then the community would be sustainable.

Then the community has to develop a plan on how to address those resources that cannot be managed in perpetuity that it currently uses to meet it's needs, and find ways to minimize the negative impact of when they cease to be available. This includes finding alternative materials, finding co-management arrangements with other communities, or finding ways to do without. Any expected loss in quality of life that would come from a loss of resources needs to be balanced against an investment in human development, so that there is no net loss in quality of life within the community for any identifiable subset of the community.

Human development would identify the obstructions that prevent people from meeting their needs, while technological development would determine how best to enhance the systems of infrastructure to increase the efficiency of how people use time to convert resources into the means to meet their needs. The initiatives that would make the most significant improvements in the time that would be used to meet all needs, per dollar invested, would be worked out and ranked.

Now, the community would have a sustainability plan.

To monitor it, you'd be looking at the rate of use of overconsumed resources, to ensure they are declining at the expected rate in the plan. You'd be looking at time use, efficiency, and effectiveness, to see that the expected change in Actualized Quality of Life is occurring, and if it isn't, you'll need to identify which development initiatives are not producing the expected returns, and which can be attempted instead.