The Vision
There are numerous indices in the world, covering a variety of topics such as democracy, happiness, freedom, access to drinking water, and innovation. In fact, there are often more than one in various areas, as you can drill down into freedoms and find indices covering freedom of the press and economic freedom, there is much more than one democracy index. There are also indices tracking poorer results, due to the darker side of humanity, which cover global slavery and corruption.
Many Indexes
One To Bring Them All
There is a need though, for an index which covers the development of each society in general, a measure of how well we are moving to a better civilization, or if you find that word has too much baggage, then we could refer to social progress, but that term is a bit vague as progress for each person is different.
An index tells us how each country and the world is doing with respect to that measure. So democracy measures how democratic each society is, which is in fact on the downward trend, as the world value for the Economist Democracy Index has gone from a peak value of 5.55 in 2015 to 5.23 in 2023, a significant and worrying decline. At the same time, the level of poverty in the world has improved as the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2023 Report stated, “25 countries halved their global MPI value well within 15 years”. They provide a caveat that most of the data was pre-Covid, which we know has worsened poverty. So hopefully, poverty is still net better but it is not at all clear.
Why Do We Need It?
Furthermore, wealth inequality has gotten worse in the entire world, in both wealthier western countries, eastern countries and developing countries. How can the wealthier countries expect to help solve wealth inequality in the poor parts of the world, when we can’t even do it in our own countries. Overall, we need a way to measure net progress, and to clearly identify which areas have improved and which have worsened, to see how each country is fairing. Are they moving in the right direction or not?
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