Social Progress Imperative

We operate under the assumption, however misguided, that how well a country is doing is related to primarily to their economic success. In fact, we rarely look at any other indicators. Enter The Social Progress Imperative, a organization whose mission is to "advance global human well being." Partnering with Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, they developed The Social Progress Index which measures how 50 countries perform on a variety of indicators related to basic human needs.

Read more about the project here and find out where the U.S. ranks (hint: we're not in the top 5)

'The Social Progress Index was hatched at a World Economic Forum working group, where participants decided that they needed common frameworks to measure the problems they were working on. "The big conceptual step was to say that if we’re trying to measure the well-being of a society, the big thing we have to do is actually look at outcomes directly rather than proxy of economic indicators," explains Michael Green, the executive director of the Social Progress Imperative. "We’re looking at social and environmental outcomes directly, which means that the index isn’t determined by economic factors."'