SOCIAL PROGRESS
A GLOBAL IMPERATIVE
"The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income" Simon Kuznets, Address to the U.S. Congress, 1934
"The Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.” Robert F. Kennedy, Speech at the University of Kansas, 1968
"In an increasingly performance-oriented society, metrics matter. What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things. In the quest to increase GDP, we may end up with a society in which citizens are worse off.” Mismeasuring Our Lives, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, 2010
What is social progress?
Why measure social progress?
We define social progress holistically, as the capacity of a society to meet the basic human needs of its citizens, establish the building blocks that allow citizens and communities to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives, and create the conditions for all individuals to reach their full potential. This definition is derived from a broad literature review and synthesis of ideas in a variety of fields.
If you don’t measure, it is hard to make the most rapid progress. More and more people recognize that GDP alone is not an adequate guide for national development strategies. The Social Progress Index brings a new rigor to this effort, not by changing the way GDP is measured but by creating a complementary lens on national performance.
The first major effort of the Social Progress Imperative is the Social Progress Index, launched April 2013. Our goal is to measure social progress directly, rigorously, and comprehensively using 3 dimensions, 12 components and 52 social and environmental indicators. The first publication of the Social Progress Index quantifies levels of social progress for 50 countries. This sample is to be expanded to at least 100 countries in 2014. The Social Progress Index has the following five characteristics, which combine to distinguish it from previous efforts to measure wellbeing:
a) Based exclusively on non-economic indicators. b) Based exclusively on outcome indicators. c) Integrates a large number of indicators into an aggregate score of social progress. d) Model is structured to allow empirical investigation of relationships between dimensions,components and indicators. e) Breadth of indicators makes the model relevant for countries at all income levels.
Social Progress Imperative THE SOCIAL PROGRESS IMPERATIVE IS A NON FOR PROFIT ORGANIZATION WHOSE GOAL IS TO ADVANCE GLOBAL HUMAN WELLBEING AND IMPROVE THE LIVES OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD, BY HELPING DECISION-MAKERS IN GOVERNMENT, THE PRIVATE SECTOR AND CIVIL SOCIETY TO IDENTIFY PRESSING SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS AND TO COLLABORATE MORE EFFECTIVELY TO EFFECT LARGE SCALE CHANGE.
Advisory Board
Board of Directors
Michael E. Porter, Chair: Bishop William Lawrence Professor at Harvard Business School.
Brizio Biondi-Morra, Chair: Chair of Avina Americas, the sister organization of Fundación Avina in the United States.
Matthew Bishop: US Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of The Economist.
Roberto Artavia Loría, Vice-Chair: President of VIVA Trust, Fundación Latinoamérica Posible, and President of INCAE Business School .
Hernando de Soto: President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru.
Sally Osberg: President and Executive Director of the Skoll Foundation.
Judith Rodin: President of The Rockefeller Foundation.
Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui: Co-founder of IGNIA Partners, and Chair of Compartamos Banco.
Scott Stern: Chair of the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Tae Yoo: Vice President of Corporate Affairs and steward of Cisco’s Corporate Social Responsibility vision.
Ngaire Woods: Dean of the new Blavatnik School of Government and Professor of Global Economic Governance at the University of Oxford.
Heather Hancock: Managing Director, Brand & Communications, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited.
Contact : www.socialprogressimperative.org
@socprogress #socialprogress partner@social-progress.org