Measuring progress and well-being: A comparative review of indicators

Chris Barrington-LeighTo whom correspondence should be addressed. We are grateful to Lorrie Herbault, Katie Keys, and Julianne Skarha for excellent research assistance; to Michael Abramson, Stefan Bergheim, Jon Hall, John Helliwell, and Raynald Létourneau for helpful discussions; and for funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec — Société et culture.  and Alice Escande

The grey bars in the lower panel of Figure 1 show the distribution of start dates of the measures we analyzed. [...] As shown by the lines in the upper panel of Figure 1, use of the term “social indicator” peaked around 1980, and the term “genuine progress indicator” appears to have been coined in the mid-1990s. [...] For example, the Tasmania Together, Measures of Australia’s Progress, Oregon Benchmarks, First Nations Community Well Being index, the CPRN Qual- ity of Life indicators, the Ontario Quality of Life indicators, and the ESDC Indicators of well-being in Canada were all initiated by governments and have not survived. [...] An economic argument relating market or shadow prices to the scope of available choices — or to the subset made in the context of market transactions — and thus to human well-being, is tenuous, especially in light of all that is now known about the importance of social factors and non-market behaviour in explaining subjective well-being. [...] Nearly half (20 of 38) of them include the words “quality of life” in the phrase describing the purpose of the effort, and one third (ten) mention “well-being”.