Beyond GDP: The Social Progress Podcast
Insight and inspiration on making the right choices for people and planet. We feature bold conversations with global leaders and innovators from government, businesses, community advocacy, foundations, and more who are charting a path for inclusive growth and sustainability. Hosted by Michael Green, CEO at Social Progress Imperative, we explore how the world must move beyond GDP metrics and economic growth to truly improve the social and environmental wellbeing of communities. ©Beyond GDP: The Social Progress Podcast is an essential listening for decision-makers ready to do things differently.
Beyond GDP: The Social Progress Podcast
GDP Is Not Destiny
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Ever wondered how we can really measure our quality of life? Economic growth is not the full answer. Michael Green explains the importance of going beyond GDP and why social progress matters.
We compare the world's richest nations, like Singapore, with economic "underdogs" like Estonia and Costa Rica to reveal who is actually delivering a better life for their citizens. GDP is definitely not destiny!
We go from "It's the economy, stupid," said in 1992, to why the United States' booming economy hasn't been able to translate its results into social progress. Why did the U.S. drop from 8th to 32nd in the world? We look at the outcomes that GDP ignores, like health, education, rights, and safety, to show you the real map of success.
Other countries we analyze their Social Progress Score vs. their GDP per capita for are Malawi, Norway, Turkey, Egypt, Guyana, Qatar, Finland, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, and the Central African Republic.
Data from 1990 to 2020 available on the Time Series Social Progress Index: https://www.socialprogress.org/social-progress-index-time-series
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It's the economy, stupid. Bill Clinton never actually said this, but the idea that economic growth is the way to make people happy and get re-elected for politicians has really been the zeitgeist for the last 30 years. That may be the zeitgeist, but is it true? What we're going to do today is have a look at the data and find out whether the Social Progress Index confirms that it's the economy stupid. Let's start with the basics. And we compare how different countries, large and small, perform by comparing their GDP per capita, that is per head of population. Now what we want to know is does economic growth translate into better lives for people? And the Social Progress Index helps us do that because it looks at all the things that make up quality of life, outcomes in lived experience, in health, education, rights, and so on. And then it adds that all up to give us a score for each country. So we can look at economic growth and social progress side by side. Now what we're going to do is we're going to put it on a chart here with social progress, that's the real quality of life on the vertical axis, higher is better, and GDP per capita, so economic performance on the horizontal axis, further to the right, is higher. Now, the richest country in the world at the moment is Singapore, with a GDP per capita of more than $130,000. And the poorest country in the world at the moment is the Central African Republic, where GDP per capita is just a little over $1,000. And yes, look, social progress is much higher in Singapore than in the Central African Republic. It is the economy stupid. Well, maybe. Let's look at two other countries. Estonia's GDP per capita is just a third of Singapore's, but it has the same level of social progress. Malawi's GDP per capita is just a little better than the Central African Republic's, but social progress, real quality of life, is much, much better. So what's going on? What I'm going to do here now is put all the countries of the world, the 171 we've been able to measure, onto this chart and then put a regression line which shows the relationship between GDP per capita and social progress through those dots. And what this shows is that yes, the economy is very important. Poor countries don't have high levels of quality of life. They don't have high levels of social progress. But GDP on its own is no guarantor of quality of life. All of the countries below the line, places like Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Guyana, Qatar, are not doing a good job of turning their wealth into social progress. On the other hand, Norway, Finland, Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Kyrgyzstan are all squeezing lots of social progress out of each dollar of GDP per capita. Simply said, GDP is not destiny. It's not just the economy, stupid. And America's story actually offers a cautionary tale. Bill Clinton, of course, was elected in 1992, and that was where the US economy was just starting a long bull run of rising GDP ever since. But all that economic growth has done little for the American people. From 1990 to 2020, the US sank from eighth in the world in social progress to 31st in the world in 2020. Economic growth on its own is not enough to guarantee better lives. We need inclusive and sustainable economic growth with social progress.