A comparison of ‘Quality of Life’ between Vietnam and Australia
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In the years following the Vietnam War my parents immigrated to Australia where I was born. As a first generation immigrant, it is impossible not to speculate about the differences between my life and those of girls of my generation who remained in Vietnam.
It is an ideological fallacy that the world is divided into two groups; the rich West and the poor East, with the former possessing a higher ‘quality of life’. When comparing ‘quality of life’ we are burdened with the preconception that material wellbeing is the sole indicator for utility. This is the misnomer of the developed world. In the field of economics, it is now widely recognised that several factors, be they social, environmental, or political, are needed to gain a broader definition. These indicators are, by necessity, an arbitrary measure. Any attempt at quantifying happiness and wellbeing is prejudice to a selection bias, affecting not only the factors of assessment, but also the units of measurement. On what scale can these indices be accurately compared? There is no empirical solution.
With these factors in mind, the aim here is to present a tentative comparison based on the tangible indicators of ‘quality of life’ between Australia and Vietnam. The data represent five of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s nine indicators for ‘quality of life’; these are geography, represented by people per square km; material wellbeing, represented by quintile income distribution; health, represented by causes of infant mortality; job security, represented by unemployment rate; and gender equality, represented by female representation in work sectors. To present a neutral image the data is not accompanied by any supplementary commentary. It can be interpreted openly without prompts or bias.
Quoth Barthes, “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author” (Roland Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’), that is; narrating a text imposes a limit to the final signified. This restricts the range of meaning that can be drawn by the reader. They are not passive receivers of texts but active players in constructing meaning. Thus, here, to promote the functions of the reader the data is left bare so that the reader may evaluate it using their own standards for ‘quality of life’.
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