Social Progress Index

[Swammerdami]

SocialProgress.Org announced its scores for 2020 recently. The data can be downloaded into Excel, but I prefer my own tool, a.out. I'm posting here to see if anyone wants specific "reports" from this large dataset: I want to test that tool.

A big news item, I guess, is that the U.S.A. fell over the recent decade on the Social Progress Index, falling more than any other country. Its absolute score is still #28 in the world, almost tied with Greece, but it's falling.

The data set comes with 66 separate scores! These are summed into three composite scores

• Basic Human Needs
• Foundations of Wellbeing
• Opportunity

which are the last three columns in the following lists. Finally these three composite scores are averaged to produce the "Social Progress Index", which is the number following the "2011-2020".

They have data for over 160 countries. (Taiwan and Brunei are the only major countries for which their data is incomplete.) But in the following I just show the top scorers, bottom scorers, and several large countries. I hope the country codes are obvious.

The following ranked list shows the difference between today's score, and the one nine years ago. Myanmar, for example, rose a whopping 20.29 points on the "Foundations of Wellbeing" score.

Myanmar 2011-2020 11.84 8.09 20.29 7.16
Gambia 2011-2020 11.58 9.46 10.43 14.83
Eswatini 2011-2020 9.92 17.28 11.96 0.52
Sri Lanka 2011-2020 9.80 8.27 13.77 7.35
Sierra Leone 2011-2020 9.36 11.22 11.38 5.48
TUN 2011-2020 8.74 4.22 8.69 13.28
IRQ 2011-2020 7.43 2.96 16.10 3.23
CHN 2011-2020 6.93 4.48 13.89 2.40
IDN 2011-2020 6.71 7.48 8.51 4.15
IND 2011-2020 5.62 9.74 9.21 -2.10
IRN 2011-2020 4.65 1.56 8.89 3.47
SAU 2011-2020 4.57 2.07 8.33 3.34
ITA 2011-2020 4.15 -0.06 7.85 4.64
MEX 2011-2020 4.03 0.70 7.25 4.16
PHL 2011-2020 4.01 2.04 8.98 0.99
RUS 2011-2020 3.66 1.84 8.89 0.24
Average 11-20 3.61 3.82 7.04 -0.03
PRT 2011-2020 3.45 1.02 6.69 2.64
CAN 2011-2020 2.93 1.87 5.51 1.43
EGY 2011-2020 2.48 1.38 4.11 1.96
GRC 2011-2020 2.42 -0.82 5.69 2.41
ESP 2011-2020 2.35 0.56 4.91 1.58
JPN 2011-2020 2.35 1.78 3.96 1.30
THA 2011-2020 2.07 2.04 7.37 -3.20
POL 2011-2020 2.02 0.98 7.44 -2.35
DNK 2011-2020 1.99 0.19 4.67 1.13
FRA 2011-2020 1.68 0.32 4.78 -0.04
TUR 2011-2020 1.42 0.98 7.69 -4.39
AUS 2011-2020 1.35 1.76 2.67 -0.39
ISR 2011-2020 1.18 0.52 2.37 0.64
DEU 2011-2020 1.17 0.21 1.71 1.59
NLD 2011-2020 0.66 0.57 0.85 0.57
GBR 2011-2020 0.64 0.00 1.40 0.53
SWE 2011-2020 0.52 0.15 2.02 -0.63
BHR 2011-2020 0.08 -0.10 5.23 -4.88
HUN 2011-2020 -0.09 0.46 3.03 -3.78
BRA 2011-2020 -0.21 0.29 5.00 -5.92
USA 2011-2020 -0.72 -1.17 2.28 -3.28

USA 2011-2017 -0.31 -1.11 2.04 -1.86
USA 2011-2016 0.34 0.42 1.43 -0.82

Curious how much of the U.S. decline was due to the 2016 tragedy or the 2020 pandemic, I showed the difference for two other periods. There seems to be a sharp decline associated with the year 2017.

Here are the absolute scores for the thirty best-scoring countries in 2020:
1 NOR 92.73 96.85 93.39 87.95
2 DNK 92.11 96.11 91.58 88.66
3 FIN 91.89 96.22 91.29 88.15
4 NZL 91.64 97.22 92.57 85.13
5 SWE 91.62 96.58 91.03 87.23
6 CHE 91.42 96.78 91.99 85.49
7 CAN 91.40 97.03 90.88 86.31
8 AUS 91.29 97.25 91.07 85.55
9 ISL 91.09 98.07 92.81 82.39
10 NLD 91.06 96.48 91.18 85.53
11 DEU 90.56 96.14 89.02 86.53
12 IRL 90.35 96.32 90.03 84.70
13 JPN 90.14 97.78 92.15 80.50
14 LUX 89.56 95.72 91.84 81.13
15 AUT 89.50 96.03 91.84 80.63
16 BEL 89.46 94.01 89.30 85.07
17 KOR 89.06 96.92 90.12 80.13
18 FRA 88.78 94.48 90.78 81.09
19 ESP 88.71 95.27 89.71 81.15
20 GBR 88.54 94.36 90.21 81.06
21 PRT 87.79 95.69 88.12 79.57
22 SVN 87.71 95.62 88.85 78.64
23 ITA 87.36 93.19 88.59 80.30
24 EST 87.26 93.08 91.50 77.21
25 CZE 86.69 95.45 86.79 77.83
26 CYP 86.64 93.40 89.66 76.84
27 GRC 85.78 93.78 85.11 78.46
28 USA 85.71 92.08 83.14 81.89
29 SGP 85.46 97.66 86.13 72.58
30 MLT 84.89 93.25 87.98 73.43

Please inform me of any specific reports you'd like to see: I want to give the a.out tool a work-out. With 66 separate data attributes in the dataset you can see almost any Social Progress variable you want!

 

[Swammerdami]

Here's another report from the Social Progress data. You can see all 66 data attributes in the database.

For each attribute, the number displayed is Canada's progress(*) from 2011-2020 Minus the USA's progress over the same period. For example, the USA improvement in "Foundations of Wellbeing" was +2.28 over the period; Canada's was +5.51. Advantage 3.23 to Canada.

* - For some of the attributes, e.g. "Child mortality rate," larger positive scores are good. (I've submitted a bug request to invert these senses, but no answer yet.)


CAN-USA 2011-2020 3.65 Social Progress Index

CAN-USA 2011-2020 3.04 Basic Human Needs
CAN-USA 2011-2020 3.23 Foundations of Wellbeing
CAN-USA 2011-2020 4.71 Opportunity

CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.08 Nutrition and Basic Medical Care
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.15 Water and Sanitation
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.09 Shelter
CAN-USA 2011-2020 12.46 Personal Safety
CAN-USA 2011-2020 1.09 Access to Basic Knowledge
CAN-USA 2011-2020 8.51 Access to Information and Communications
CAN-USA 2011-2020 2.28 Health and Wellness
CAN-USA 2011-2020 1.02 Environmental Quality
CAN-USA 2011-2020 3.45 Personal Rights
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -1.43 Personal Freedom and Choice
CAN-USA 2011-2020 14.72 Inclusiveness
CAN-USA 2011-2020 2.07 Access to Advanced Education
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.00 Undernourishment (% of pop.)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.61 Deaths from infectious diseases (deaths/100,000)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.22 Child stunting (% of children)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.10 Maternal mortality rate (deaths/100,000 live births)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.19 Child mortality rate (deaths/1,000 live births)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.02 Unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene attributable deaths (per 100,000 pop.)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.04 Populations using unsafe or unimproved water sources (%)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.48 Populations using unsafe or unimproved sanitation (%)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.00 Usage of clean fuels and technology for cooking (% of pop.)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.00 Access to electricity (% of pop.)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.49 Household air pollution attributable deaths (deaths/100,000)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.54 Traffic deaths (deaths/100,000)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.06 Political killings and torture (0=low freedom; 1=high freedom)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -2.00 Perceived criminality (1=low; 5=high)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.02 Homicide rate (deaths/100,000)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.47 Access to quality education (0=unequal; 4=equal)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.00 Women with no schooling
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.00 Gender parity in secondary attainment (distance from parity)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -1.19 Primary school enrollment (% of children)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -1.02 Secondary school attainment (% of population)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.18 Access to online governance (0=low; 1=high)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.71 Media censorship (0=frequent; 4=rare)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -5.57 Internet users (% of pop.)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -20.45 Mobile telephone subscriptions (subscriptions/100 people)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.27 Access to quality healthcare (0=unequal; 4=equal)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.91 Access to essential services (0=none; 100=full coverage)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -5.76 Premature deaths from non-communicable diseases (deaths/100,000)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.54 Life expectancy at 60 (years)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 742.00 Greenhouse gas emissions (total CO2 equivalents)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.05 Particulate matter
CAN-USA 2011-2020 1.37 Biome protection
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.24 Outdoor air pollution attributable deaths (deaths/100,000)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 4.00 Political rights (0=no rights; 40=full rights)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.10 Freedom of expression (0=no freedom; 1=full freedom)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.09 Freedom of religion (0=no freedom; 4=full freedom)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.03 Access to justice (0=non-existent; 1=observed)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.01 Property rights for women (0=no right; 5=full rights)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.26 Vulnerable employment (% of employees)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -3.00 Corruption (0=high; 100=low)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.82 Early marriage (% of women)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.70 Satisfied demand for contraception (% of women)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.72 Equality of political power by socioeconomic position (0=unequal power; 4=equal power)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.10 Equality of political power by social group (0=unequal power; 4=equal power)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.86 Equality of political power by gender (0=unequal power; 4=equal power)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -3.40 Discrimination and violence against minorities (0=low; 10=high)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.03 Acceptance of gays and lesbians (0=low; 100=high)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -86.00 Quality weighted universities (points)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.24 Citable documents
CAN-USA 2011-2020 -0.01 Women with advanced education (%)
CAN-USA 2011-2020 0.47 Years of tertiary schooling

 

[ruby sparks]

Hi Swammerdami,

Thanks for posting on an interesting topic. I had never heard of the Social Progress Index before.

I found your lists hard to parse, but I did find some other stuff at the website, including the facility to compare selected countries directly against one another.

https://www.socialprogress.org/

 

[Derec]

I would be curious what criteria they use if they place US behind Greece or Cypurs.

 

[Swammerdami]

Here's another report from the Social Progress data. You can see all 66 data attributes in the database....

* - For some of the attributes, e.g. "Child mortality rate," larger positive scores are good BAD. ...

Ooops! Speaking of sense inversion, I meant BAD. I've corrected it in the quote-box above, but may have missed the Edit window for post #2.

IIUC, there are 62 attributes divided into 3 categories. Using weights the attributes are summed into the three major category scores, which are then averaged to produce the grand total, the "Social Progress Index." Some of the weights (e.g. for "Child mortality rate") are negative.

If anyone finds a write-up on the weights' values, please let me know. Otherwise I may try to discover them using a linear regression.

Hi Swammerdami,

Thanks for posting on an interesting topic. I had never heard of the Social Progress Index before.

I found your lists hard to parse, but I did find some other stuff at the website, including the facility to compare selected countries directly against one another.

https://www.socialprogress.org/

While I hope to duplicate the arithmetic functionality, I'll never have a good user interface. :-( But I want to be able to answer questions like Derec's:

I would be curious what criteria they use if they place US behind Greece or Cypurs.

First: Did you see post #2? I listed all 62 criteria, showing the column names from their spreadsheet. Remember this is Social Progress, not GDP or military might. As just one example, Greece outperforms the USA on "Maternal mortality rate (deaths/100,000 live births)." Greece ranks #31 with 8.7 deaths; USA #72 with 29.3 deaths.

Second: Greece is now in a virtual tie with USA. USA outperforms Greece in many categories, and vice versa. Greece's rank has had a very narrow range over the ten years of the study, always about #27. The interesting story is USA which was #19 in 2011, #22 in 2016, #26 in 2017 and #28 in 2020. USA's #28 rank isn't so bad. There are over 160 countries in this massive database; USA outperforms most of them, including of course all undeveloped or "developing" countries.

That's why I'm focusing on the change between 2011 and 2020, rather than the absolute scores.

Third: Some of the criteria may reflect big "political" bias. I think the USA gets big demotion for its emissions of CO2 — this will be resented by those who think climate change is a hoax promulgated by AOC to help finance child slavery or fake birth certificates, or whatever it is.

I really need the criteria weights to say exactly why a country scores as it does. For now I'll just give some examples of the Greece/USA differences:
* Greece outscores USA on environmental quality, personal safety, political rights and political equality, several health criteria, and (lack of) discrimination/violence against minorities.
* USA outscores Greece on education, personal freedom, phones and internet, (lack of) corruption, acceptance of gays and lesbians, and freedom of religion.

Those are just examples. I'll be better placed to answer such questions when I've determined the weights SPI uses.

 

[Swammerdami]

I did do some linear regressions. I discovered that the Social Progress Index is simply the average (with equal weights) of 12 subcategory scores:

4 "Nutrition and Basic Medical Care"
5 "Water and Sanitation"
6 "Shelter"
7 "Personal Safety"
8 "Access to Basic Knowledge"
9 "Access to Information and Communications"
10 "Health and Wellness"
11 "Environmental Quality"
12 "Personal Rights" Weights = 0.421990 19.687739 5.097844 18.924509 4.822994
13 "Personal Freedom and Choice"
14 "Inclusiveness"
15 "Access to Advanced Education"

I think I'll base any further reports on these 12 criteria. (The prefixed numbers shown above are each 6 less than the column number in SPI's Excel file.)

I checked some (not all) of these subtotals to see if they were linear sums of their constituents. Only "Presonal Rights" was; the weights are shown above.

 

[lpetrich]

Something that would be interesting to do is look for correlations between the various indices. It would be interesting to find what axes of variation there are -- which indices of well-being tend to be correlated with which other indices.

I'm willing to do that myself if I can download a file of raw data -- every index for every nation.

 

[Swammerdami]

Something that would be interesting to do is look for correlations between the various indices. It would be interesting to find what axes of variation there are -- which indices of well-being tend to be correlated with which other indices.

I'm willing to do that myself if I can download a file of raw data -- every index for every nation.

SPI's website has a Download Data option. You get Excel format; I selected Save as CSV from Excel; and massaged the data until it was suitable for a giant C initializer.

% wc socprogix.h
1938 137598 1067736 socprogix.h​

I'd email you the result but I made a (big?) mistake: I replaced all the empty cells with "0." I think I should have used a special code like "-666." (I did ignore all rows with a " 0," when doing the linear regressions.) If you want my result, I'll probably redo it for you, using "-666" or such for the empty cells.

OTOH, I've solved for eigenvectors (PCA) myself before, using Numerical Recipes in C. (But any task will wait until after my trip to hospital tomorrow.)

 

[lpetrich]

The site's home page: Social Progress Imperative

Thanx for pointing out where to find it. But turning the data into a huge C header file may cause a compiler to choke. A CSV file or a tab-delimited file would be easier for me.

 

[Swammerdami]

A 1-megabyte header will choke your compiler? Are you running the compiler on your wristwatch?

In any event, the .h file I speak of is already CSV; and can be made tab-separated with a trivial sed command.

 

[lpetrich]

A 1-megabyte header will choke your compiler? Are you running the compiler on your wristwatch?

No. I remember from long ago a compiler having trouble with a large static array, some array with over 32K members, IIRC. So I was concerned that an array with size 140K would cause trouble. If the data is all in one array, that is.

BTW, thanx for mentioning where to look for the data files. I've gone and downloaded them myself. I can read CSV with Python, and XLSX and CSV with Mathematica.

It's easy for me to find CSV parsers in plain C and C++ -- like this one for C++: GitHub - ben-strasser/fast-cpp-csv-parser: fast-cpp-csv-parser

 

[Swammerdami]

Here are the normalized covariances I calculated over 10 years and 163 countries. The 12 attributes are in the same order as in post #6 above.

1.000 .9572 .9463 .6774 .8430 .8010 .8499 .1279 .4123 .8332 .4473 .8482
.9572 1.000 .9467 .6459 .8416 .7903 .8488 .1490 .4007 .8504 .4397 .8573
.9463 .9467 1.000 .6182 .8151 .8064 .8581 .1341 .4215 .8315 .4590 .8359
.6774 .6459 .6182 1.000 .6210 .6636 .7392 .3693 .6114 .7133 .6543 .6647
.8430 .8416 .8151 .6210 1.000 .7256 .7447 .2345 .4281 .8427 .4879 .8174
.8010 .7903 .8064 .6636 .7256 1.000 .8004 .3225 .6480 .8060 .6037 .8297
.8499 .8488 .8581 .7392 .7447 .8004 1.000 .3462 .5472 .8355 .6258 .8339
.1279 .1490 .1341 .3693 .2345 .3225 .3462 1.000 .5796 .2653 .6105 .2242
.4123 .4007 .4215 .6114 .4281 .6480 .5472 .5796 1.000 .5329 .8214 .5173
.8332 .8504 .8315 .7133 .8427 .8060 .8355 .2653 .5329 1.000 .6200 .8425
.4473 .4397 .4590 .6543 .4879 .6037 .6258 .6105 .8214 .6200 1.000 .5705
.8482 .8573 .8359 .6647 .8174 .8297 .8339 .2242 .5173 .8425 .5705 1.000

Here is the most principal component (Eigenvalue 8.37 out of 12):
Year 2020) .317 .314 .312 .281 .302 .317 .317 .148 .233 .320 .237 .313
Year 2011) .316 .318 .317 .275 .300 .318 .320 .104 .233 .320 .247 .317

Here is the 2nd most principal component (Eigenvalue 1.70 out of 12):
Year 2020) -.238 -.253 -.242 .138 -.137 .002 -.037 .563 .468 -.052 .473 -.139
Year 2011) -.244 -.238 -.224 .127 -.154 .038 -.007 .614 .450 -.082 .447 -.087

By inspection you can see that the 2nd most principal "Eigencountry" scores well on specifically "Environmental Quality", "Personal Rights", "Inclusiveness," and to a lesser extent "Personal Safety." It scores poorly on all "Basic Human Needs" except Personal Safety.

All 163 countries were given equal weight in this result. Better, probably, would be to weight by population.

 

[Swammerdami]

Using the "Eigencountries" just derived, here is a list of the countries in the top 40 w/r Eigencountry 1, along with the bottom 20. (The list is Hidden to make skimming the thread less tedious.) Naturally this list matches the SPI itself somewhat: Goodness criteria tend to correlate. (The "top"/"bottom" sense is arbitrary with eigenvectors; consider the sign choices I made arbitrary.)

Show

1 Norway
2 Denmark
3 Switzerland
4 Finland
5 Sweden
6 Luxembourg
7 Canada
8 New_Zealand
9 Iceland
10 Netherlands
11 Ireland
12 Germany
13 Australia
14 Belgium
15 Japan
16 Austria
17 France
18 United_Kingdom
19 Spain
20 Korea_Republic_of
21 Italy
22 Estonia
23 Portugal
24 Slovenia
25 Cyprus
26 Malta
27 Czechia
28 United_States
29 Uruguay
30 Singapore
31 Costa_Rica
32 Greece
33 Israel
34 Lithuania
35 Chile
36 Poland
37 Latvia
38 Slovakia
39 Barbados
40 Croatia

144 Angola
145 Haiti
146 Liberia
147 Ethiopia
148 Sierra_Leone
149 Burkina_Faso
150 Mali
151 Mozambique
152 Afghanistan
153 Madagascar
154 Guinea-Bissau
155 Papua_New_Guinea
156 Guinea
157 Congo_Democratic_Republic_of
158 Niger
159 Burundi
160 Eritrea
161 Somalia
162 Central_African_Republic
163 Chad

Here is the match with "Eigencountry 2" (matching countries with good environmental quality and personal freedom, but poor score on basic needs). Again, the top 40 are shown, along with the bottom 20 and 2 others. Saudi Arabia scores dead last(*); China also comes in very low.
* - "Dead last" is misleading: High performance on basic needs leads to a worse score due to the way "principal component analysis" works.

Show

1 Finland
2 Norway
3 New_Zealand
4 Denmark
5 Sweden
6 Ireland
7 Luxembourg
8 Canada
9 Netherlands
10 Australia
11 Switzerland
12 Portugal
13 Iceland
14 Germany
15 Belgium
16 Spain
17 Italy
18 Japan
19 Slovenia
20 France
21 Austria
22 Costa_Rica
23 United_Kingdom
24 Greece
25 Estonia
26 Uruguay
27 Malta
28 Cyprus
29 Korea_Republic_of
30 Jamaica
31 Lithuania
32 Czechia
33 Benin
34 Liberia
35 Panama
36 Sierra_Leone
37 Chile
38 Latvia
39 Poland
40 Senegal

45 United_States
52 Israel

144 Afghanistan
145 Equatorial_Guinea
146 India
147 Iraq
148 Pakistan
149 Azerbaijan
150 Uzbekistan
151 United_Arab_Emirates
152 Eritrea
153 Sudan
154 Iran
155 Turkey
156 Tajikistan
157 Qatar
158 Turkmenistan
159 China
160 Korea_Democratic_Republic_of
161 Egypt
162 Bahrain
163 Saudi_Arabia

 

[lpetrich]

Here are all the 66 categories of the SPI, organized in tree form:

Social Progress Index

• Basic Human Needs
  • Nutrition and Basic Medical Care
    • Undernourishment (% of pop.)
    • Maternal mortality rate (deaths/100,000 live births)
    • Child mortality rate (deaths/1,000 live births)
    • Child stunting (% of children)
    • Deaths from infectious diseases (deaths/100,000)
  • Water and Sanitation
    • Unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene attributable deaths (per 100,000 pop.)
    • Populations using unsafe or unimproved water sources (%)
    • Populations using unsafe or unimproved sanitation (%)
  • Shelter
    • Access to electricity (% of pop.)
    • Household air pollution attributable deaths (deaths/100,000)
    • Usage of clean fuels and technology for cooking (% of pop.)
  • Personal Safety
    • Homicide rate (deaths/100,000)
    • Perceived criminality (1=low; 5=high)
    • Political killings and torture (0=low freedom; 1=high freedom)
    • Traffic deaths (deaths/100,000)
• Foundations of Wellbeing
  • Access to Basic Knowledge
    • Women with no schooling
    • Primary school enrollment (% of children)
    • Secondary school attainment (% of population)
    • Gender parity in secondary attainment (distance from parity)
    • Access to quality education (0=unequal; 4=equal)
  • Access to Information and Communications
    • Mobile telephone subscriptions (subscriptions/100 people)
    • Internet users (% of pop.)
    • Access to online governance (0=low; 1=high)
    • Media censorship (0=frequent; 4=rare)
  • Health and Wellness
    • Life expectancy at 60 (years)
    • Premature deaths from non-communicable diseases (deaths/100,000)
    • Access to essential services (0=none; 100=full coverage)
    • Access to quality healthcare (0=unequal; 4=equal)
  • Environmental Quality
    • Outdoor air pollution attributable deaths (deaths/100,000)
    • Greenhouse gas emissions (total CO2 equivalents)
    • Particulate matter
    • Biome protection
• Opportunity
  • Personal Rights
    • Political rights (0=no rights; 40=full rights)
    • Freedom of expression (0=no freedom; 1=full freedom)
    • Freedom of religion (0=no freedom; 4=full freedom)
    • Access to justice (0=non-existent; 1=observed)
    • Property rights for women (0=no right; 5=full rights)
  • Personal Freedom and Choice
    • Vulnerable employment (% of employees)
    • Early marriage (% of women)
    • Satisfied demand for contraception (% of women)
    • Corruption (0=high; 100=low)
  • Inclusiveness
    • Acceptance of gays and lesbians (0=low; 100=high)
    • Discrimination and violence against minorities (0=low; 10=high)
    • Equality of political power by gender (0=unequal power; 4=equal power)
    • Equality of political power by socioeconomic position (0=unequal power; 4=equal power)
    • Equality of political power by social group (0=unequal power; 4=equal power)
  • Access to Advanced Education
    • Years of tertiary schooling
    • Women with advanced education (%)
    • Quality weighted universities (points)
    • Citable documents

 

[lpetrich]

Here is a truncated version of that list:

Social Progress Index

• Basic Human Needs
  • Nutrition and Basic Medical Care
  • Water and Sanitation
  • Shelter
  • Personal Safety
• Foundations of Wellbeing
  • Access to Basic Knowledge
  • Access to Information and Communications
  • Health and Wellness
  • Environmental Quality
• Opportunity
  • Personal Rights
  • Personal Freedom and Choice
  • Inclusiveness
  • Access to Advanced Education

Even further:

Social Progress Index

• Basic Human Needs
• Foundations of Wellbeing
• Opportunity

 

[ronburgundy]

Here are the normalized covariances I calculated over 10 years and 163 countries. The 12 attributes are in the same order as in post #6 above.

1.000 .9572 .9463 .6774 .8430 .8010 .8499 .1279 .4123 .8332 .4473 .8482
.9572 1.000 .9467 .6459 .8416 .7903 .8488 .1490 .4007 .8504 .4397 .8573
.9463 .9467 1.000 .6182 .8151 .8064 .8581 .1341 .4215 .8315 .4590 .8359
.6774 .6459 .6182 1.000 .6210 .6636 .7392 .3693 .6114 .7133 .6543 .6647
.8430 .8416 .8151 .6210 1.000 .7256 .7447 .2345 .4281 .8427 .4879 .8174
.8010 .7903 .8064 .6636 .7256 1.000 .8004 .3225 .6480 .8060 .6037 .8297
.8499 .8488 .8581 .7392 .7447 .8004 1.000 .3462 .5472 .8355 .6258 .8339
.1279 .1490 .1341 .3693 .2345 .3225 .3462 1.000 .5796 .2653 .6105 .2242
.4123 .4007 .4215 .6114 .4281 .6480 .5472 .5796 1.000 .5329 .8214 .5173
.8332 .8504 .8315 .7133 .8427 .8060 .8355 .2653 .5329 1.000 .6200 .8425
.4473 .4397 .4590 .6543 .4879 .6037 .6258 .6105 .8214 .6200 1.000 .5705
.8482 .8573 .8359 .6647 .8174 .8297 .8339 .2242 .5173 .8425 .5705 1.000

Here is the most principal component (Eigenvalue 8.37 out of 12):
Year 2020) .317 .314 .312 .281 .302 .317 .317 .148 .233 .320 .237 .313
Year 2011) .316 .318 .317 .275 .300 .318 .320 .104 .233 .320 .247 .317

Here is the 2nd most principal component (Eigenvalue 1.70 out of 12):
Year 2020) -.238 -.253 -.242 .138 -.137 .002 -.037 .563 .468 -.052 .473 -.139
Year 2011) -.244 -.238 -.224 .127 -.154 .038 -.007 .614 .450 -.082 .447 -.087

By inspection you can see that the 2nd most principal "Eigencountry" scores well on specifically "Environmental Quality", "Personal Rights", "Inclusiveness," and to a lesser extent "Personal Safety." It scores poorly on all "Basic Human Needs" except Personal Safety.

All 163 countries were given equal weight in this result. Better, probably, would be to weight by population.

Interesting. "Environmental Quality" is the only poor match to other dimensions, and only modestly related to "rights" and "inclusiveness", which both have decent relation to most other dimensions. If you just drop "Environmental Quality" do the other 11 dimensions yield a single component solution?

 

[ronburgundy]

Some dimensions appear to be based in more objective quantified data than others. "Personal Rights" seems quite problematic for two reasons. First, they include some things that are dubious as indicators of "rights", such as % of people participating in elections. People choosing not to vote, perhaps b/c they are satisfied and don't think their rights are under threat, is not an indicator of lack of rights. Also, some countries increase participation via legally forcing people to vote and thereby violating their right not to vote.

A second problem is that even the sub-dimensions that seem most legit as "rights" (freedom of expression and of religion) are not measured in an objective or consistent way. They have academic Ph.D experts (presumably in poli-sci or history) living in each country to rate their own country's "freedoms" from "none" to "full". Being Ph.Ds, they may be less culture-bound than the general pop, but their subjective reference poiints for what qualifies as "full" or "some" freedom of expression is going to be impacted by reference points based in their personal, experience-based expectations.