(2021-03-21) A Dashboard For Progress

Jason Crawford: A dashboard for progress: instead of trying for a single metric (aka GDP), what if we look at a dashboard comprising a handful of metrics

Here’s a candidate list:

Most of these are just consumption metrics, based on a simple theory that consumption is good and is closely correlated with material well-being.

For agriculture, I chose a productivity metric, because of the nature of the market: we only need so much food, after which point progress has largely been made by providing it with fewer people.

Some ways in which this approach is not perfect:

Does not capture quality.

Does not capture well-being.

I happen to know two of these metrics, from previous research, and both have stagnated. Here is energy...

And here is mortality (Life Expectancy)...

Discussion thread.