When I first started talking to Dina who is helping me with research, I explained that I consider myself a technology optimist. By which I mean that I am optimistic that over time we the human species will figure out how to use technology to make things better. Dina rightly challenged me to define what I mean by “better” and by the related word “progress.” And that turns out to be a lot harder than I thought.
Let’s start with what it is not. Economic growth as measured by GDP is an increasingly bad measure of progress. First, it doesn’t speak at all about people and how we live our lives. Hypothetically all of us working and shopping frantically will make GDP great even if we were all exhausted and tired all the time (come to think of it, that is pretty close to what we are doing). Second, it has no notion of sustainability built into it or put differently it doesn’t capture negative externalities. Selling a product that pollutes the air increases GDP even if it results in more asthma. To make matter worse, selling Asthma medication to those affected then further increases GDP. And third, it doesn’t do well with non-rival information goods. For instance, as we have something like Wikipedia replacing Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica GDP actually shrinks. So at a time when we have taken good care of basic needs around clothing, food, transportation, housing GDP is becoming increasingly the wrong measure of progress.
What about measuring happiness directly? Bhutan is trying to measure a Gross National Happiness instead of GDP. That is directionally interesting although measuring happiness is difficult and fraught with problems. For starters, it is unclear if anyone actually knows whether or not they are happy (reality TV has successfully further confused this issue if it was ever clear). Happiness as a direct measure also raises huge questions about pharmaceuticals which Aldous Huxley anticipated so well with Soma in Brave New World. Finally there is the question as to whether we really want to be happy if that in turn might mean intellectually and artistically unproductive.
Finland has taken a different approach with a so-called Genuine Progress Indicator. This is an attempt to measure both the benefits and costs of economic activity more directly. So for instance, a GPI might subtract the cost of pollution. Various calculations for both Finland and the US have shown GPI being flat even at times of GDP growth, especially in the last couple of decades. One of the biggest criticisms of the GPI approach is that many of these measurements are somewhat arbitrary and so adding them all into a single metric isn’t very informative (different weightings will likely give you very different results).
So there is definitely a strong argument to be made for tracking multiple different measures. But just like running a business one would want to reduce this to as few measurements (as in KPIs) as possible. As I have been thinking about that the ones that seem especially relevant are measures of freedom, including
1. Freedom of expression
2. Freedom of movement
3. Freedom from violence
4. Freedom from disease
5. Freedom from poverty
6. Freedom to organize
7. Freedom to innovate
8. Freedom of time
The first seven are pretty self explanatory. With the last one I mean how much of our time is free to do what we want to do (as opposed to what we have to do).
There are three things I like about the idea of focusing on freedom measures for progress. First, I think all of these can be collected in relatively objective numerical ways. Second, even without a formal time series that someone has already put together they seem to foot well with the sense that we are better off than say in the Middle Ages, i.e. that we have de facto made progress. Third, on many of these measures there is still a lot of progress to be made and we also see how we can easily locally regress.
There is an important caveat here though which is that these freedom measures do not explicitly address any notion of sustainability. I need to think more about whether that should be captured through another set of measures or whether that is already contained in trying to forecast these measures for future generations of humans. Another way to capture sustainability might be to look at similar measures also for other species.
Would love to get reactions to this and also be pointed to any work that people have done on measuring these freedoms.
