Date: 2024-09-27 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021354
Management Metrics
Social Progress Index (SPI)
The main components of the Social Progress Index
Copy of original article: Social-Progress-Index-2021-Executive-Summary.pdf
Burgess COMMENTARY
The Social Progress Indicator (SPI) initiative is major progress towards better metrics. It improves substantially on the widely used GDP (Gross Domestic Product) indicator that has been used for a very long time going back originally to the Great Depression in the 1930s. Kuznets and Keynes both spoke out about the need for a better measure of progress as far back as the 1960s, as did Robert Kennedy when he was campaigning for President, but the GDP keeps on going even though it is bl;atantly not fit-for-purpose.
I would like to see a version of the SPI that embraces Social, Environmental and Economic performance in a single framework. Most of the essential elements are already present in the SPI framing, though not quite in the best possible way for performance monitoring. I am trying to build such a framework ... but am progressing quite slowly.
In general the GDP metric originated to have a primary focus on macro-economic performance, while the SPI combines the more micro-elements in a way that aggregates to a more realistic macro-indicator. This is important and useful progress.
The TVM components and the framing aims to have a set of elements that serve not only to address progress and performance at the macro level (the national level and world level) but also at the individual level and all levels in-between. The TVM framing aims to be coherent and consistent so that aggregation is both logical and realistic. This is not easy when many activities in the system result in both negative and positive impacts at the same time depending on the particular actor perspective that is being presented.
Peter Burgess
* There are 17 indicators in the Basic Human Needs segment
* There are 14 indicators in the Foundations of Wellbeing segment
* There are 19 indicators in the Opportunity segment
One of the key accomplishments of the Social Progress Imperative is to have a single index or indicator. In the process the SPI has lost some of its clarity of purpose.
In TVM the three segments relate to Society, Environment and Economy with a variety of ways in which progress and performance may be summarized depending on the perspective of the analysis.
