For almost a century, the world has relied mostly on GDP* as a way to assess a country’s progress and compare it to other nations. But about 10 years ago, a group of economists from the United Kingdom, United States, and other nations created a different way to judge nations’ success: a social progress index.
The idea was pretty simple, explains Michael Green, who leads the project. “Let’s measure people’s real lived experience, based on the real things that matter to real people,” Green says. “Am I living in a good society where everyone has enough to eat, everyone is safe, everyone gets a decent education?”
The index collects 50 metrics of well-being—nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education, and more—to measure quality of life. Norway comes out on top in 2020, followed by Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand. South Sudan is at the bottom, with Chad, Central African Republic, and Eritrea just behind. The U.S. ranks 28th, still toward the top of the 163-country list, but behind significantly poorer countries such as Estonia, Czechia, Cyprus, and Greece.
“The data paint an alarming picture of the state of our nation,” says Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, about U.S. scores overall, though the U.S. does very well in some categories, such as higher education and access to electricity.
There’s a lot of reason for optimism in the 2020 report, though. Of the 163 countries evaluated this year, 155 have improved their scores in the past decade.
“We also see that GDP isn’t destiny,” Green says. “At any level of GDP, some countries are better at turning their wealth into social progress than others.”