Individual wealth has diminishing returns on investment. The marginal utility of each extra dollar of income is less. There’s reason to believe that we’ll have to slowly shift the focus of our efforts elseware, if we want to continue making equally huge strides forward.
We hit the UN’s old goal of having extreme poverty level from 1990. We even did it 5 years ahead of the 2015 target date, which is fantastic. But if we want to hit the next set of goals, we’ll need more than just more economic growth. For example, this TED talk indicates that all of the UN’s Global Goals can be expressed roughly as an increase in global Social Progress Index from 61 to ~75. However, if we rely entirely on continued economic growth and don’t have any social change, then he claims we will only move from 61 to ~62.4.
As an asside, I find the Social Progress Index to be an interesting metric. It’s an equally weighted composit of “Basic Human Needs” (such as nutrition and basic medicine), “Foundations of Wellbeing” (such as access to education and information), and “Opportunit” (such as personal rights and tollerence).
Individual wealth has diminishing returns on investment. The marginal utility of each extra dollar of income is less. There’s reason to believe that we’ll have to slowly shift the focus of our efforts elseware, if we want to continue making equally huge strides forward.
We hit the UN’s old goal of having extreme poverty level from 1990. We even did it 5 years ahead of the 2015 target date, which is fantastic. But if we want to hit the next set of goals, we’ll need more than just more economic growth. For example, this TED talk indicates that all of the UN’s Global Goals can be expressed roughly as an increase in global Social Progress Index from 61 to ~75. However, if we rely entirely on continued economic growth and don’t have any social change, then he claims we will only move from 61 to ~62.4.
As an asside, I find the Social Progress Index to be an interesting metric. It’s an equally weighted composit of “Basic Human Needs” (such as nutrition and basic medicine), “Foundations of Wellbeing” (such as access to education and information), and “Opportunit” (such as personal rights and tollerence).