Non-quantifiable quality of life factors

Sometimes in the development sector we discuss so-called non-economic or non-quantifiable quality of life factors. These are things like fresh air or the satisfaction of growing your own food that are not adequately accounted for in purely economic analyses. Often people who advocate for such things are essentially saying that the poor should remain barefoot and backwards in order to maintain traditional values that the outside observer finds cute. Such arguments amount to "Don't expand your cash crop production--it offends my agrarian sensibilities" or "Don't move to the city, even if it means multiplying your income by 10". I perhaps lean toward such discourses, though I normally try not to let my own dogmas or personal preferences keep other people in situations with which they are not satisfied.

Anyway, today we took a group of my wife's visiting sisters and nieces and nephews to visit the same farm in Arcabuco I've profiled before. The kids marveled at the animals, the fish, the streams, and everything else that always wows me when I go there. It made me realize that despite my wife's and my occasional gripes with the poor selection of movies and restaurants in our small city, we really do benefit from many non-economic quality of life factors. Our food is fresher, we have easy access to the countryside, we derive satisfaction from working with farmers that can really use our help. The kids we took to the farm would never be able to have such an experience in their hometowns of Medellin and Bogota. All the money of these big cities can't buy a simple, free jaunt to a nearby farm to buy trout. In fact, we can even quantify the benefit of our ready access to this place; a visit to the agriculture-based theme parks just outside of Bogota and Medellin (a concept I fully support) costs 30000 pesos, or about $16US per person. So for the twelve people we took to our friend's farm, it would have cost almost $200US to get into a synthetic version of a real farm. As is, we paid like $40US for about 14 pounds of fresh-caught filleted trout, plus $11US I gave to our friend for having showed us around.

So small-town life may not be great for movie-goers or eat-out gourmands, but it's got its bright spots.