The Report by the Commission on Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress written by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, et al. (2009) made it clear that gross domestic product (GDP), though a useful indicator of output, is not a good measure of well-being. In sum, the report recommended the following:
1. "When evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production";
3. "Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth";
4. "Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth";
5. "Broaden income measures to non-market activities";
6. "Quality of life depends on people's objective conditions and capabilities. Steps should be taken to improve measures of people's health, education, personal activities, and environmental conditions. In particular substantial effort should be developing and implementing robust, reliable measures of social connections, political voice, and insecurity that can be shown to predict life satisfaction";
7. "Quality-of-life indicators in all the dimensions covered should assess inequalities in a comprehensive way";
8. "Surveys should be designed to assess the links between quality-of-life domains for each person, and this information should be used when designing policies in various fields";
9. "Statistical offices should provide the information needed to aggregate across quality-of-life dimensions, allowing the construction of different indexes";
10. "Measures of both objective and subjective well-being provide key information about people's quality of life. Statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture people's life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities in their own survey";
11. "Sustainability assessment requires a well-identified dashboard of indicators. The distinctive feature of the components of this dashboard should be that they are interpretable as variations of some underlying 'stocks'. A monetary index of sustainability has its place in such a dashboard but, under the current state of the art, it should remain essentially focused on economic aspects of sustainability"; and
12. "The environmental aspects of sustainability deserve a separate follow-up based on a well-chosen set of physical indicators. In particular there is a need for a clear indicator of our proximity to dangerous levels of environmental damage (such as associated with climate change or the depletion of fishing stocks)".
Quite a comprehensive set of recommendations. PROUT's simple but most important indicator is an increasing minimum standard of living.
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