We would do well to withhold our praise of another seemingly new composite index such as the SPI.
How do we know if a place is thriving? For decades now, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been the metric used to answer that question. GDP (and its predecessor, Gross National Product, or GNP) were reasonably accurate proxies for measuring a nation’s ability to produce wealth for its citizens. Despite GDP’s success as a key (if not the key) indicator for society, policy makers have longed questioned the metric’s exclusionary focus on economic factors at the expense of other social elements. However, a new initiative called the Social Progress Index (SPI) claims to have created a new way of assessing our society beyond GDP.
SPI aims high. According to its creators, Michael Porter, Scott Stern, and Michael Green, SPI offers a “robust and holistic measurement framework for national social and environmental performance that can be used by leaders in government, business, and civil society to benchmark success and accelerate progress.” Its creators envision “a world in which social progress sits alongside GDP as a core benchmark for national performance,” and they view SPI as the main tool to “guide strategy for inclusive growth.” Celebrated by the likes of TED and New York Times, SPI advocates have captured the prevailing zeitgeist surrounding our current anxieties about assessments. However, despite claiming to be the “first comprehensive framework for measuring social progress that is independent of GDP, and complementary to it,” the SPI’s methodology and underlying aspirations are not even that new. Rather, the SPI sits at the end of a much longer history of attempting to measure “social” concerns alongside economic metrics.
The origins of “social” indexes go back as far as the development of GNP. While economists and policymakers were searching for ways to measure the economy in attempts to stymy the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover was likewise seeking better ways of understanding the “social trends” of his day. Published in 1933, ...
... the social indicators movement had a much longer life internationally. Mahbub ul Haq, who had led the focus on distribution in the 1970s, worked through the UN Development Programme, to craft the Human Development Index (HDI). Established in 2000, the UN’s Millennium Development Goals contain a set of objectives that can only be measured and assessed with the help of social indicators. Indeed, the SPI is only another attempt at placing the social alongside or even above the economic.
We would do well to withhold our praise of another seemingly new composite index, such as the SPI. After all, the SPI’s leaders suggest “measuring social progress guides us in translating economic gains into advancing social and environmental performance in ways that will unleash even greater economic success.” Their end goal remains economic “success” and growth. Yet it was the pursuit of such growth that inspired interest in social indicators fifty years ago, and it is that continued quest for economic progress that underlies the current anxiety. What is needed now is a much deeper reflection on how we come to define social and economic goals and the interrelationship between them. Rather than lauding the next great index to come along that promises new “social” insights, we would do better to question the underlying ideologies and patterns of behavior that make such indicators seem so necessary in the first place.