The long-term answer is clear: infant mortality and median height of children at some early age (IIRC, something like 8yr? I forget). Which doesn't help for the short-term. For short-term, perhaps affordability of housing by lowest decile of income ?
Price of a quarter-pounder with cheese and E.coli.
One has to be a bit careful to avoid this becoming a circular indicator, and also to avoid picking one important thing to the detriment of all others. Both Chet's suggestions are really important, but I don't think either of them should be the single gold standard in the sense that GDP or GDP growth is. You could have cheap housing for the poor, but all sorts of other things going wrong, and you wouldn't want to think of that as a success.
I think the answer might lie with some variant of the Robert C. Allen "subsistence ratio" idea - you measure prosperity by looking at the absolute minimum you require in cheap protein, calories and fats to sustain life, plus a bit of clothing and soap and so forth, and then dividing incomes by that.
Then the metric could simply be the share of the population that has a ratio of 2-3, of 3-4 and so on - you could probably boil that down to a single number like a Gini coefficient. (Maths needed here.)
How can we worry about the morality of infants? They're too small to do much bad even if they want to.
I would keep using GDP, but put it alongside two other core indicators:
1. How much free time people have in a typical week
2. How much money do people have left over after necessities
Obviously (2) is not at all simple as what we perceive as "necessities" changes over time and varies by household type. But I think if you set the BLS at it they could create something meaningful.
I would keep using GDP, but put it alongside two other core indicators:
1. How much free time people have in a typical week
2. How much money do people have left over after necessities
Obviously (2) is not at all simple as what we perceive as "necessities" changes over time and varies by household type. But I think if you set the BLS at it they could create something meaningful.
Actually I think 2 might be a lot easier than 1! That's really an "Allen basket" approach like I talked about in 4.
How much free time, though... that's a tricky one. Free from what?
You can't really get it in one number without making up a new formula, along the lines of the (stupid) "misery index."
A combination of GDP and Gini coefficient captures a lot of it. If you can add a third number to the formula, maybe it's CO2 percentage in the atmosphere.
I'll leave it to the mathematicians to work out the actual formula.
How much free time, though... that's a tricky one. Free from what?
"Free, dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke.
Art thou one ENTITLED to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude.
Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free FOR WHAT?"
To my mind inequality and even CO2 are intermediate measures to what we really want, quality of life, as slippery as that is.
We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do! And we wanna get loaded! And we wanna have a good time!
12: Yup. The whole exercise is necessarily reductive. My theory is that in an environment of economic growth* and low inequality, people will have freedom to choose a life with more leisure.
One statistic that is currently on my mind, though, is the electoral college count for the fascist party.
*I'm kind of a neoliberal that way.
Nietzsche was a syphillitic asshole.
14. People who rely on growth are going to have to find a better model if we reach peak human within the next decade, as seems plausible. Can AI keep the show on the road with less and less wetware to consume stuff?
I remain convinced that measures like infant mortality, height at age [some young age, I'm not an expert, but probably] 8, and birth weight are key indicators of the health of a society. Here's a couple articles about that in the UK:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/21/children-raised-under-uk-austerity-shorter-than-european-peers-study
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/02/uk-austerity-policies-premature-low-birth-weight-babies-scotland
We can measure things like GDP, and inequality, but these are all things that can be gamed. As someone once noted, if an nation produces lots of carcinogens, and its citizens are afflicted with lots of cancer, then the economic activity to treat those cancers will show up in the GDP. Similarly with cleanup of toxic waste.
And they're -indirect- measures, where the most direct measures we can devise, are the ones I've noted. There are probably others: I remember reading that height at age 18 is also an important measure, b/c it captures the developmental environment of children throughout childhood, which encompasses nutrition, pollution, violence, and other "insults" that can and do limit growth.
We probably want to include measures of health of adults also: rates of chronic illnesses, cancer, etc.
16: per capita growth, then. Remember most countries are poor and most people in rich countries are not rich. Plenty of room for growth and improvements in welfare.
Yes, GDP can be gamed a bit, but overall it's surprising how solid the correlation is between GDP and most of the health measures Chet mentions.
Children.
I have a simple solution to that.
On the theme of why single metrics will always be problematic, I enjoyed John Kay's book about why companies should treat profits with a more indirect approach: Obliquity.
In a more blunt style, there is The Tyrrany of Metrics.
my bestie is ?finishing? a year long slog of producing a company metric that is... inviting misuse. Should I get these books for them now, while they can technically persuade people to set it up as (say) either a measure or a goal but not both; or should they read them afterwards, in exhaustion and despair?
Or, playing the actual post game, I'm on Chet's side in 1 & 17. All the other stuff is either game-able or an epiphenomenon to having the children we have be healthy.
Having so much extra stuff that we can keep most of our children healthy while being dangerously wasteful, eg GHG, carcinogens, carcinogenic GHGs.... cf. 20!