Social Progress Index

[Belsnickel]

I know this will go over like a pregnant pole-vaulter with some people here, but I thought it would be something interesting to put out there. http://ideas.ted.com/why-we-shouldnt-judge-a-country-by-its-gdp/

Quote:Analysts, reporters and big thinkers love to talk about Gross Domestic Product. Put simply, GDP, which tallies the value of all the goods and services produced by a country each year, has become the yardstick by which we measure a country’s success. But there’s a big, elephant-like problem with that: GDP only accounts for a country’s economic performance, not the happiness or well-being of its citizens. With GDP, if your richest 100 people get richer, your GDP rises … but most of your citizens are just as badly off as they were before.

That’s one of the reasons the team that I lead at the Social Progress Imperative launched the Social Progress Index in 2014. The Social Progress Index determines what it means to be a good society according to three dimensions: Basic Human Needs (food, water, shelter, safety); Foundations of Wellbeing (basic education, information, health and a sustainable environment); and Opportunity (do people have rights, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination, and access to higher education?)

Together, these 12 components form the Social Progress framework. We evaluated them using data from a wide variety of international sources (see the full list) to assess 133 countries to come up with a ranking of the world’s most socially progressive countries — and this year, for the first time, an overall progress score for the world. Here are six charts from the 2015 ranking that I think speak volumes.