Why What We Measure Matters

This week, my key takeaway came from the Fast Company article “Forget GDP: The Social Progress Indicator Measures Well-Being”. This article discusses the Social Progress Index, a metric created by The Social Progress Imperative and Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter. This metric measures the personal safety, ecosystem sustainability, health and wellness, shelter, sanitation, equity and inclusion, and personal freedom and choice of a country’s citizens, and provides a value with which social progress can be compared across countries. The Social Progress Index was launched by a World Economic Forum working group to create a measure similar to GDP, but one that is better able to measure true well-being.

For a while now, I have been interested in alternative measures of wellbeing. While the measure of GDP per-capita is a good measure of the affluence of a country’s citizens, it does a relatively poor job at measuring those citizens' overall wellbeing. Events that have a objectively negative effect on citizens, such as natural disasters and war, are often great for GDP. Though GDP is an important measure, it is not perfect, and it’s important to explore other alternative measures of wellbeing, like the Social Progress Index, to get a fuller picture of the state of a nation.

The Social Progress Index brings to mind another alternative measure of wellbeing, the Gross National Happiness measure put forth by the government of Bhutan. The Gross National Happiness survey asks citizens questions like:

• “Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are?”
• “Please think deeply and tell me, what are the most important things that will make you lead a happy life”
• In the last 4 weeks, how often have you “been losing confidence in yourself?”

(To see the full questionnaire visit: http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/Questionnaire/Questionnaire2014.pdf)

The questionnaire also collections information on health, education, living standards, ecological diversity, culture, and community vitality. It aims to gather a full picture of the standard of living in Bhutan, and how this changes over time. This helps the government inform their decisions and gather information about the aspirations and goals of their citizens (http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/SurveyFindings/Summaryof2015GNHIndex.pdf)   

What we measure, we improve.

This often stated phrase states so simply why what we measure matters. Building these alternative measures of wellbeing, like the Social Progress Index and Bhutan’s Gross Domestic Happiness measure, is an important step in helping our societies describe the changes they wish to see in themselves. They give us a way to benchmark progress and identify weaknesses. These two metrics are good, but what else do we need to measure in our societies to get a full picture of our wellbeing? Is there anything that these 2 metrics are missing? Is there aspect of society is vitally important, but simply can’t be measured?