94. The effectiveness of a country's leaders is best measured by examining the well-being of that country's citizens.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting you

Nowadays, it is becoming increasingly important to measure a leader’s effectiveness. Thus, people are looking for the best grading criterion according this criterion they can find and choose the most effective leader. I agree with the author’s opinion that the best way to measure a leader’s effectiveness is through examining the well-being of the citizens. Opponents to this claim may argue that this criterion is ambiguous and abstract, thus they consider the success of elites, such as artists, scientists and architects, as the best indicator of the leader’s performance.

People who disagree with the author’s view may prefer to measure the effectiveness of a country’s leader by examining the success of an individual in the related fields. By comparing total number of prizes received by artists, scientists and athletes of different countries, we can compare the politicians’ effort in art, science and sports. As we can more easily measure the success of an individual and not the well-being of all citizens, thus the former is better than the latter in measuring the leader’s effectiveness. However, the success of an individual is neither representative nor related closely to the effectiveness of a country’s leader. The success of the young talent pianist Lang Lang derives from an extremely strict and successful family education. While he was practicing piano as a child, his same-aged friends were facing the problem to drop out school due to their parents’ poor receiving. Thus, no matter how many international prizes that Lang Lang has receives, these prizes represent only the efforts that he and his family have made. These awards neither relates to the nation’s support for music nor represent the artistic accomplishment of the other citizens.

Another reason for people are unwilling to take the public’s well-being as the best criterion is that this criterion is abstract and hard to be measured. They contend that it is difficult to define well-being as everyone has their opinion. Some people prioritize health, but other put money and power as first place. The difficulty to measure the well-being objectively prevent it from being the best criterion. I partly agree with this claim that the well-being is absolutely cannot be measured. Even though some people tried to look for an alternative concept to represent the well-being of the public. They used the world happiness to replace well-being. However, happiness is also a subjective word and is not measurable neither. Thus, in my opinion, even if we cannot check the public’s well-being directly, we can measure it indirectly by decomposing the well-being of the public into several measurable parts, such as citizen’s living condition, employees job promotion chances, ordinary people’s enjoyment of art and culture and poor family’s accessibility to superior education. As far as we can separate the public’ s well-being into several measurable parts, through analyzing each part, we can rate the leader’s effectiveness.

Another reason for using the public’s well-being as the best measurement is their importance in every leader’s political career. By accentuating the public’s well-being, we can strengthen the leader’s awareness to each citizen’s satisfaction and force them to make more efforts for their people. Leaders who negate the public’s feeling do not only ruin their own career but also bring disastrous results to the country. The emperor Qin Shihuang was overthrown by the peasant uprising troops for that he ignored peasants’ poor living condition and forced them further to build grand palace for himself. Another example is Cersi Lannister’s failure in the last war against Daenerys Targaryen. The former considers her people as a weapon to protect her crown, but the latter fight ceaselessly for the people’s well-being. In short, it is necessary to regard the public’s well-being as the most important grading criterion because that leaders who negate the public’s welfare may bring catastrophe to the country.

Even though some people may prefer using the achievements of elites to judge the effectiveness of a leader, an elite’ success mainly stems from his/her own efforts and is not representative for the country. At first glance the well-being of the public seems like an ambiguous and unmeasurable criterion, however we can decompose it into several measurable parts. All in all, the well-being of the public is the goal of a politician, thus we should also regard it as the best measurement.