Who gets to decide the definition of "well-being"?

I took issue with one of the readings for this week: "Forget the GDP the social progress index measures national well-being."  Mainly because it is derived mainly by one gentleman, and later a team of eight (participants and board members) who get to decide what factors are important when evaluating a country and which of the fifty-two criteria are more relevant than another.

Wanting to have a better understanding of who else was involved in the project, I looked up the team of people and noticed there was a lack of diversity of the team. There was no one on the team from Africa or India. While the metrics used to evaluate the countries seemed to be clear, perhaps the order in which they evaluated would shift leaving another country to be present in the top five countries. For example, one measure of health and wellbeing in their study is longevity. Depending on culture and personal preference not everyone wants to experience the affects of old age. One of the commenters on the article also poignantly pointed out that (although a vague concept to measure) culture was not considered as a means to evaluate the country. For some countries education / work opportunity might not be rank as high but their cultural landscape adds a great deal to their overall "wellbeing" and happiness.

Which leads to me to wonder, how would this index change if the people involved in the study had diverse backgrounds that more accurately depict the world population?




Sources:
http://www.socialprogressimperative.org/blog/posts/meet-the-social-progress-imperative-team-michael-green-executive-director

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681830/forget-gdp-the-social-progress-index-measures-national-well-being

http://www.socialprogressimperative.org/data/spi/methodology