Date: 2024-12-26 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021345
Management Metrics
Social Progress Index (SPI)
SPI ... a better metric than GDP. The Components of the Social Progress Index
This image was copied from Page 5 of the PDF referenced below.
Original paper: SPI-report-for-Amazonia-2014.pdf
Burgess COMMENTARY
The Social Progress Index (SPI) is a very well formed metric to evaluate the state of society, considerably better structured than GDP (Gross Domestic Product). GDP is flawed in many important ways, not least being its lack of differentiation between economic activity that destroys good things and activity that generates good things. Accordingly there is a massive distortion created by aggregating bad and good activity when in true terms the one activity negates the other activity.
This problem with GDP as a measure was recognised by economists such as Keynes and Kuznets a very long time ago, but the widespread use of the GDP persists more than 50 years later. This is no accident. Political leaders around the world have demonstrated over and over again that they do not want meaningful metrics because it is usually not politically convenient.
This is what Robert Kennedy said when he was running for President and just before he was assassinated.
