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GDP also does not address inequality. A few people could become extraordinarily wealthy, while the rest of a country is plunged into poverty and hunger, but this wouldn’t be reflected in the GDP. In the turbulent 1960s, Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general of the United States and brother of President John F. Kennedy, famously said of GDP during a 1968 address to students at the University of Kansas: “It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities . . . [but] the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children. . . . [I]t measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” For countries like the United States that already have large or strong economies, it is not clear that simply making the economy larger will improve human welfare. Developed countries struggle with issues like obesity, diabetes, crime, and environmental challenges. Increasingly, even poorer countries are struggling with these same issues. Noting the difficulties that many countries experience as they grow wealthier (such as increased crime and obesity), people around the world have begun to wonder: What if we measure the things we really care about directly, rather than assuming that greater GDP will mean improvement in everything we care about? Is that even possible? The good news is that it is. There is a new way to think about prosperity, one that does not depend on measuring economic activity using traditional tools like GDP. Advocates of the “Beyond GDP” movement, people ranging from university professors to leaders of businesses, frompoliticians to religious leaders, are calling formore attention to directly measuring things we all care about, such as hunger, homelessness, disease, and unsafe water. One of the new tools that has been developed is called the Social Progress Index (SPI), and it is the data from this index that is featured in this series of books, Social Progress and Sustainability. The SPI has been created to measure and advance social progress outcomes at a fine level of detail in communities of different sizes and at different levels of wealth. This means that we can compare the performance of very different countries using one standard set of measurements, to get a sense of how well different countries perform compared to each other. The index measures how the different parts of society, including governments, businesses, not-for-profits, social entrepreneurs, universities, and colleges, work together to improve human welfare. Similarly, it does not strictly measure the actions taken in a particular place. Instead, it measures the outcomes in a place. The SPI begins by defining what it means to be a good society, structured around three fundamental themes: • Do people have the basic needs for survival: food, water, shelter, and safety? • Do people have the building blocks of a better future: education, information, health, and sustainable ecosystems?

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S OCIAL P ROGRESS AROUND THE G LOBE