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Mike2022 posted an update 2 years ago ·
a year ago (edited)
SPI vs GDP
Do not judge a country by its GDP, the world has been bamboozled into thinking GDP is the best measure of a country’s success and by proxy the lives of the people who live in that country. We need to use the SPI, (Social Progress Index) to measure the true social progress of the people in the country. 1) basic human needs; 2) foundations of wellbeing, such as information, communication, wellness, a healthy ecosystem; and 3) opportunity, including higher education, personal rights, freedom and choice.
In lay man’s term, although a country has multiple hospitals and health facilities, the affordability of healthcare plays a major role as much as the accessibility. Although a country has less than 5% unemployment rate, what is the quality of work-life balance of an individual in the workforce? A country might have multiple very accredited Universities, but do they foster freedom of thought and freedom of expression? There are many more nuances which validate the SPI over GDP.
Even Simon Kuznets who developed the GDP, said “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income”. He developed GDP as a means of measuring the impact of the great depression. It enabled governments to track any increase or decrease in their nation’s wealth as represented by the value of goods and services produced.
GDP has never been a measure of an individual’s prosperity in the country. In my humble opinion, GDP can never measure life satisfaction, happiness and the anxiety an individual experiences in a country. In fact it’s my stand that GDP completely misleads, this trend of rising income inequality in our country despite GDP growth reveals that not everyone is reaping the benefits of this growth, nor leading a prosperous life, demonstrating that GDP is a poor proxy for citizens’ wellbeing.
Using GDP to aggregate the wellbeing of a country’s citizen would be like using the grades a student gets on his exams to assume his health, mental wellbeing and social interactions are correlated to the As, Bs, Cs, or Fs that he or she gets.
~Images from Getty Images & NPT
