The Social Progress Initiative

[lpetrich]

Social Progress Imperative

The Social Progress Index is a new way to define the success of our societies. It is a comprehensive measure of real quality of life, independent of economic indicators. The Social Progress Index is designed to complement, rather than replace, economic measures such as GDP.

“Countries need a new measure that assesses and quantifies the things that really matter to real people: Do I have enough to eat? Do I have shelter? Can I get an education? The Social Progress Index was created to meet that need.”
Michael Green, CEO of the Social Progress Imperative
View his TED talk “What the Social Progress Index Can Reveal About Your Country”

From Figure 1 in Social Progress Imperative: Framework questions for Social Progress Index 2018:

• Basic Human Needs
  • Nutrition & Basic Medical Care: Do people have enough food to eat and are they receiving basic medical care?
  • Water & Sanitation: Can people drink water and keep themselves clean without getting sick?
  • Shelter: Do people have adequate housing with basic utilities?
  • Personal Safety: Do people feel safe?
• Foundations of Wellbeing
  • Access to Basic Knowledge: Do people have access to an educational foundation?
  • Access to Information & Communications: Can people freely access ideas and information from anywhere in the world?
  • Health & Wellness: Do people live long and healthy lives?
  • Environmental Quality: Is this society using its resources so they will be available to future generations?
• Opportunity
  • Personal Rights: Are people's rights as individuals protected?
  • Personal Freedom & Choice: Are people free to make their own life choices?
  • Inclusiveness: Is no one excluded from the opportunity to be a contributing member of society?
  • Access to Advanced Education: Do people have the opportunity to access the world's most advanced knowledge?

 

[lpetrich]

That site has a map of the world that shows the nations' scores as colors. I would have wanted continuous colors, but instead they decided on 6 groupings.

1. Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Japan.
2. Australia, the US, Costa Rica, Chile, Uruguay, Israel, South Korea, the rest of Western and Central Europe, and some ex-Communist Eastern European countries.
3. Most of Central and South America, northwest Africa, the UAE and Oman, Jordan, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, the remaining ex-Communist Eastern European countries and some ex-Communist Central Asian ones.
4. Communist China, India, Mongolia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, some African countries, Indonesia, and the remaining ex-Communist Central Asian ones.
5. Several African countries, Pakistan, and the remaining Southeast Asian ones.
6. The remaining African countries, Yemen.

One can download the data, so that one can see how the different data items correlate with each other.

The Executive Summary contains a graph comparing SPI scores with GDP per capita (Figure 4).

European nations tend to be above the curve, having higher SPI than one might expect for their GDP. The SPI seems to have a maximum of 90 out of 100. The United States, despite a high GDP per capita, has a SPI more comparable to that of European countries with half its GDP per capita. Other below-the-curve ones are Singapore, Russia, Turkey, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Those last four are well below the scatter of the other data points.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I like that Tier 1 was set just enough to allow Canada in. I'm guessing that's because there was some Canadian dude involved in setting up the rankings and not because "Top 14" or "Upper part of the 88th percentile" suddenly became a thing.

 

[lpetrich]

Here are some more indices:

 Democracy Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit of Economist magazine.

The top nations are the Scandinavian nations, the Anglo ex-British-Empire nations, Ireland, the German nations (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), Uruguay, Mauritius, Malta, Spain, and Costa Rica. The US was below South Korea, Japan, Chile, and Estonia. Saudi Arabia was one of the worst, and the worst of all was North Korea.

Fragile States Index | The Fund for Peace,  Fragile States Index -- the best nations were the German and Scandinavian nations, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The US was the 25th least fragile. Somalia was bumped out of #1 status by South Sudan.

What it contains:

Cohesion:
C1: Security Apparatus
C2: Factionalized Elites
C3: Group Grievance
Economic:
E1: Economic Decline
E2: Uneven Economic Development
E3: Human Flight and Brain Drain
Political:
P1: State Legitimacy
P2: Public Services
P3: Human Rights and Rule of Law
Social and Cross-Cutting:
S1: Demographic Pressures
S2: Refugees and IDPs
X1: External Intervention

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This needs some definitions!

What is "quality of electricity supply"??

And I question "access to piped water" as a criteria as it seems to ding a country for having rural people who get their water from wells.

 

[Jarhyn]

This needs some definitions!

What is "quality of electricity supply"??

And I question "access to piped water" as a criteria as it seems to ding a country for having rural people who get their water from wells.

Access to piped water is still a thing in rural areas. Shitting in a bucket or lugging water from a well still blows goats.

Oh, and as someone who has been overseas, electricity supply definitely has variations in quality.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This needs some definitions!

What is "quality of electricity supply"??

And I question "access to piped water" as a criteria as it seems to ding a country for having rural people who get their water from wells.

Access to piped water is still a thing in rural areas. Shitting in a bucket or lugging water from a well still blows goats.

If they count wells as piped water then the US should be basically 100% for permanent habitation.

Oh, and as someone who has been overseas, electricity supply definitely has variations in quality.

But how do they measure it?

 

[Jarhyn]

If they count wells as piped water then the US should be basically 100% for permanent habitation.

Oh, and as someone who has been overseas, electricity supply definitely has variations in quality.

But how do they measure it?

The point is that there is a difference between wells that have pipes and wells that don't have pipes, and much of the world doesn't have the latter, and that categorically sucks for them.

As for quality of electricity, you can measure it all kinds of ways, from global uptime of service (many communities only have power for a number of hours per day), availability of given current (think "commonness of brownout"; can I power a dishwasher or clothes machine on the current available?), To maximum current available from existing infrastructure (can I plug this dishwasher in without starting a fire? Or without blowing a transformer?).

All these things can degrade a rating from "sufficient for modern life" to "limited utility", to "totally fucking useless". As to how to rank those things, a lot depends on the rubric, but it isn't hard to design a points deduction based on any of the above factors.