Well, thank you for that kind welcome.
And, I'm so thrilled again, to be
at the Skoll Forum, and to just get the energy
of everybody here, and the energy for change,
and the energy for tackling challenges that are frankly
incredibly challenging, incredibly difficult.
As Michael said, I think I am a kind of reformed economist.
You know, I spent much of my career
working on economic development,
and I co-chaired the Global Competitiveness Report
which is now kind of the standard way
that countries compare themselves
in terms of economic development.
And, I think we've actually learned quite a bit
about economic development, and we've taken our thinking
about economic development to really a whole new level
in the world.
And, I'm proud of that.
And, I think that's good.
But, I think what we have come to understand is that,
you know, the traditional model of development
focused on economic development alone is incomplete
and frankly, has created many, many problems in the world.
And, the challenge we have now is to kind of open
up our model of development,
and think about it in a more fundamental way.
And in order to do that,
we're gonna have to go beyond just economics.
And we're gonna have to avoid the shortcut
of thinking that if we can just get the economics right,
everything else takes for it takes care of itself.
And, that is the work that I have been doing
with a wonderful group of colleagues
on this notion of the Social Progress Index.
So, let me give you that very high level view
of what we're trying to do and what it might mean for you,
the folks here at this meeting, and invite you all
to work with us and push us and challenge us,
and we'll work together, hopefully, to make this truly
the paradigm shift that Michael, just so boldly spoke about.
The traditional thinking
about development has really been riveted on
as you see here, economic development.
And this assumption has been that
if we achieve improving economic development and higher GDP
per capita,
that will lead to a better society.
And there, as we'll see, there's a good reason
for that thinking,
and actually the effect is there.
Economic progress does make a positive difference,
in general, to social progress.
But we've also learned that sometimes,
and we're seeing this more
and more economic development is not leading to the kind
of societal progress that we all care about and hope for.
And the Arab Spring is just one manifestation of that.
Tunisia was a country that was really
successful economically.
It was a star in terms of economic development,
but ultimately, this country fell apart.
Why?
Because the economic progress wasn't leading
to the kind of societal progress that we all hope for.
We're also learning something that I think all
of you intuitively knew, but it take us,
took us economists a long time to catch up.
And, that is that unless you have a certain societal fabric,
and societal assets, and societal improvement,
ultimately you run into a wall on economic development.
You can't do that successfully.
So, what we're cutting to see is there's really
a two way connection here.
Economic development is important
for moving society forward, but not always.
And, moving society forward is critical to actually
succeeding over the long run in economic development.
But ultimately, this is gonna require us to kind of open
up our work, and our thinking,
and our measurement on the social side
just as we historically have focused primarily
on the economic side.
If we're going to actually open up this paradigm
and expand it, we're gonna have to learn how to
measure social progress itself
rather than the shortcut of GDP.
And, that's what the Social Progress Index project
is really all about.
This is a project that's been underway now
for about four years.
Last week, we released the 2015 version
of the Social Progress Index.
I hope you saw it.
And if you haven't, I hope you'll look at it.
It's based on a number
of premises that we have to bring the same rigor
of measurement to social progress
as we long have to economic progress
if we're gonna achieve these dual goals of development.
To achieve both.
The Social Progress framework
then is based on a number of core premises.
One that when we measure social progress,
we should do that exclusively.
We shouldn't mix in economic variables.
A lot of the previous efforts here have commingled economic
and social, and that actually obscures
what's going on
rather than clarifies it.
We're not, we don't know what's causing what.
We don't know what it's enabling what.
So, the Social Progress Index, as you'll see,
is fundamentally only about societal improvement.
It's focused on outcomes
not how hard we tried, not how hard, much money we spent.
We're trying to measure just the outcomes of society.
And I think, this is something that the field
of social development needs to really embrace much
more aggressively.
We have to focus on outcomes.
Good intentions are not enough.
Working hard is not enough.
It's the outcomes that matter.
And this effort tries to capture those absolutely directly.
We try to create a holistic framework that applies
to every country.
Every country can improve.
There's a wide set of social attributes
and characteristics of society that matter.
We need to try to capture as many of those as possible
rather than the siloed view
of social progress that we often see
where everybody works on their issue
rather than sees holistically
how the entire society is progressing
and how the pieces fit together.
And finally, we need to be specific enough
and concrete enough that it's actionable,
that we're actually measuring things that we
can imagine actually changing
because we're measuring at a concrete level.
We're not measuring broad concepts.
We're measuring specific dimensions of a good society.
The Social Progress Index framework then,
it looks like this.
There, as we see social progress broadly,
we see it in three fundamental categories.
One, are we meeting people's basic needs
in the country, in the society, in the region?
As you'll see later,
we can look at this at the national level,
but we can also look
at it actually at the regional level, the municipal level,
at any level we want.
Are we creating the foundations of wellbeing
and a better life?
Things like access to basic knowledge,
things like access to information and communication,
and so forth, you see.
And finally, and very, very importantly,
it turns out from the work we've done,
is there opportunity for any citizen
in the society to reach their full potential,
whatever the potential they wanna pursue?
Is that opportunity present?
These three broad dimensions then
add up to what we define as social progress.
And of course, we've got a very granular, data driven way
of trying to measure those concretely
with the help of many of you.
There's a vast literature and knowledge
about social development and about all of these dimensions.
What we found is the best possible measures
that cover a large number of countries.
And we've pulled those together in what I believe is a very,
very rigorous measurement framework.
Now, this kind of gives you a picture of the world.
If the world, if this,
if we wanted to look at the world as a whole,
where are we making the most progress?
The way the Social Progress is measured is it's put
on a scale of zero to a hundred.
Zero is the worst we've ever seen in any country ever.
A hundred is the best performance we've ever seen
in any country ever on a particular dimension.
So, you can think of this as kind of an absolute score.
The closer to a hundred,
the closer we've solved this problem.
The closer to zero,
the closer we are to being nowhere.
And if you look at the major dimensions of Social Progress,
you can see that on terms of basic human needs,
in terms of access to basic knowledge,
we've made a lot of progress in the world.
On average, we're performing at a quite high level.
But you can see that on many other dimensions
of Social Progress, the picture is very, very different.
We're much, much farther behind.
And, it's interesting that one of the major challenges
in the world is this issue of opportunity.
How can we create societies where there really
is opportunity for everybody
rather than limits on their rights, or intolerance,
or discrimination, or other other forms
of those limits.
We use this framework to actually now look
at 133 countries in the world
accounting for virtually all the world's population,
99% of it.
For each of those countries,
we can now have a very rigorous picture
of how society is progressing and doing in that place.
And this is just a part of the ranking
of those 133 countries.
If you look down this list, you can take any country there,
and now pull it apart.
Really expose the society and how it's progressing.
And, to do that we also make use of the linkage
between the social improvement and the economic improvement.
So, what this chart does is
it sort of plots the social progress of the country
versus the economic development of the country.
And what you see is yes, there's a relationship.
Improving economic prosperity is associated
with better social progress.
But boy, it's a messy and incomplete relationship.
And, we can see countries on the lower part,
below the line, that are really underperforming
from a social progress point of view.
And, you can see that China and Russia and India,
as much economic progress as they've made,
the society is lagging behind.
You can see other countries, like New Zealand,
or Costa Rica, or Norway, where the opposite is true.
Where the society's overperforming.
What you would expect given the level of GDP.
And, that says that that social policy matters,
that social policy can be driven and affected.
It's not all a fatalistic result of your economic success.
And people, like you, are making a gigantic difference,
on the ground, country by country.
And, this data is just revealing that very, very clearly.
Now, once we have this measurement framework,
once we can apply the same rigorous measurement
to social progress
as we have long applied economic progress, you know,
what does that allow us to do?
Well, first of all, we can benchmark our performance.
We can say, how are we doing?
How is this country performing relative to its peers,
relative to countries of similar economic development?
You know, is the U.S. doing well,
or is the U.S. doing poorly?
Where are we better; where we worse?
What are our strengths, and what are our weaknesses?
What are the priorities?
If we look rigorously and compare ourselves
to other countries that are in a comparable situation.
We've never been able to do this before.
When we think about social development,
we think in silos, we think about it, discrete issues.
We think about
we kind of have been inward looking.
We have to start comparing and measuring ourselves
if we're gonna actually take this incredibly
important feel for the future of the world,
and move it more rapidly than we have even in the past.
Now, let me just show you some of the data.
Here is my country, the United States.
This is kind of the dashboard
of how the U.S. is doing on social progress
compared to other countries of similar economic prosperity.
And, the answer is lousy.
You know, America thinks,
we think of ourselves as number one.
We're nowhere near number one.
In many of these areas of social progress,
the U.S. was actually a leader, a pioneer.
Universal primary education, access to universities.
Area after area,
if you look at the proud history of the U.S., we led,
not just in economic, but in social development.
But now, for a variety of reasons, we've slipped.
We're far behind.
Our dashboard is covered with red.
We're failing
because we haven't looked at these things in this way.
We haven't had the visibility to actually compare ourselves
to what we should be achieving relative
to other advanced countries.
Now, let's take Costa Rica.
Here's a much lower income country,
but its dashboard is full of green.
It's been able, through a remarkable commitment
and remarkable policy and the work of many people
like you, to really move way ahead on some dimensions
of social progress for a country at its level
of development.
Now, but even Costa Rica has some issues.
And, this analysis allows us to see exactly where
those red spots are,
and hopefully, do something about them
and set better priorities.
And what we're hoping, and this is starting to happen,
is that nations are starting to use this dashboard
alongside of their economic dashboard.
And finally,
we have the opportunity to kind of accelerate the change
in many of these dimensions.
We're gonna hear a little bit later about Brazil.
I thought you'd be interested in the Brazil dashboard.
You know, Brazil's got some great strengths.
Brazil is actually doing pretty well
on social progress overall,
but there's some conspicuous problem areas.
And you'll hear about some of those.
And then finally,
Paul Farmer probably will talk a little bit about Rwanda.
Rwanda's a country that started
in a disastrous situation 20 years ago,
and because of an enormous focus on Social Progress
in a variety of critical areas, you see a lot of green.
And, I personally believe having worked
in Rwanda that the economic success
of Rwanda today, that has been sustained now
for well over a decade,
is due to the fact
that the country also made aggressive investments
in lighting up this dashboard with green
in a variety of key areas, including health,
that that Paul will talk about.
The opportunity we have here is to really
change our paradigm for development.
I think what we have to understand is
economic development is two things.
It's economic progress.
It's increasing economic prosperity, but at the same time
it's improving society.
And, we can't leave the improving society part to chance.
We've gotta give that visibility.
We've gotta view that as equally important.
And ultimately I think what we'll find 10 or 20
years from now, is actually the improving society part
will probably be the key to economic development.
And, that's the opportunity.
And, that's our obligation as we do this work
and work with all of you in the process.
So, we'd love to hear all of your thoughts about this.
We'd love to hear how we can make it better.
We'd love to work with you at the grassroots level
wherever you're working.
I think we have an opportunity to change the game
in development over the next five or 10 years.
Thank you.