Coming from business, I think of progress in terms of measurements. "What is measured, gets managed" is a famous quote from Peter Drucker. My students and I talk about KPIs in class, looking first at typical business KPIs, then government or economic (inflation, employment, etc), but then talk about KPIs we don't tend to see news reports on (teen suicide, depression, savings rates for bottom 3 quartiles of Americans, infant mortality). My argument is that a lot of what we think of about society's ills are related to what we measure and manage. Long ago, someone proposed that we put more metrics like the later into the newspapers, so they were viewed along side the stock market. This was circa 1994 or so.
Coming from business, I think of progress in terms of measurements. "What is measured, gets managed" is a famous quote from Peter Drucker. My students and I talk about KPIs in class, looking first at typical business KPIs, then government or economic (inflation, employment, etc), but then talk about KPIs we don't tend to see news reports on (teen suicide, depression, savings rates for bottom 3 quartiles of Americans, infant mortality). My argument is that a lot of what we think of about society's ills are related to what we measure and manage. Long ago, someone proposed that we put more metrics like the later into the newspapers, so they were viewed along side the stock market. This was circa 1994 or so.