How Do We Measure Progress?
The measure of progress is not what humanity possesses, but the quality of human beings and relationships it produces. What would it look like to measure that?
The measure of progress is not what humanity possesses, but the quality of the lives and relationships it makes possible.
That is not how we usually keep score. We count output, income, growth, the number of things made and sold. We designed economies around endless growth, politics around competing interests, and technology around capturing attention. Then we ask why human beings struggle to find enough, trust one another, or understand themselves.
Part of the answer is simple. We get more of what we measure. If we only measure possessions, we will keep producing possessions, whether or not anyone becomes happier, kinder or less afraid.
This may sound like dismissing the economic growth that has lifted many people out of poverty. It isn’t. Growth has done real good. The question is whether it is the right measure of progress, not whether it has value.
What our measures leave out
A good measure should show the full cost of something. Ours often hide it.
Who bears the cost of what we call cheap? Someone always does: a worker, a farmer, a river, a future generation. The price tag simply doesn’t show them. We call it flexibility when the cost lands on someone else’s planning. And the scarce thing is never what is priced. That is why it stays scarce. Time with our children, clean air, a neighbour we can rely on: none of these has a price, so none of them appears in the numbers.
We are also part of the problem as buyers. Nobody wants to be exploited, and almost everybody is excited by the trade that does it. The bargain feels like a win because the loss is out of sight.
Even our best intentions get turned into numbers too quickly. Sustainability is not a target to hit. It is a relationship to keep. A target can be met on paper while the relationship it was meant to protect keeps getting worse.
“The measure of progress is not what humanity possesses, but the quality of the lives and relationships it makes possible.”
A different set of measures
Madhyasth Darshan names the human goal (मानव लक्ष्य) as four things together: समाधान, समृद्धि, अभय and सहअस्तित्व. On this site we call them clarity, enough, trust and harmony. Together they are what we mean by good.
If those are the goal, they are also the measures. Each can be turned into a plain question that any household, village or company could ask itself:
Clarity. Can the people here answer the why and how of their own lives, or are they mostly getting by on habit and instruction?
Enough. Does every family here know what enough is, and have it?
Trust. Are people here afraid of one another? Of their neighbours, their managers, their own relatives?
Harmony. Does what we take from nature, and from each other, return in some form? Or does it only flow one way?
None of these is easy to count. That is not a flaw. It means they have to be measured partly the way relationships are measured: by looking, asking and listening over time. Numbers still help. Savings, hours spent together, days off sick or debts paid down can show change that a conversation misses, and the conversation can explain what the numbers mean.
Where it gets measured first
In Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), Shri A. Nagraj observes that the family is the first step in which humanity shows its worth, and that whatever is missing in the family cannot be supplied anywhere else. That makes the family the first place to measure progress, before the nation, before the economy.
The same thinking can reach into work. Can we design a company where every family has enough, without turning people’s needs into something that must constantly be audited? We think so, and it would be a better measure of a company’s success than its quarterly growth. We set out five measures a business can keep in How Should a Business Measure Success?
It changes what leadership means, too. Leadership is not the ability to influence people, but the responsibility to understand what is worth leading them toward.
The achievement worth aiming for
The next great achievement of humanity may not be discovering another habitable planet. It may be discovering how eight billion human beings can live on this one with understanding, prosperity, fearlessness and coexistence.
That achievement won’t show up first in a national statistic. It will show up in households where people can say how much is enough, where children aren’t afraid, where disagreements get resolved and the land is left better than it was found.
A protocol to try
Once a month, sit down with your family and ask four questions about your own home. Don’t give scores. Just talk. Agreement around the table isn’t always the whole truth, so give anyone who would rather answer privately a way to do that.
Where is there clarity this month, and where is there confusion? Do we know what enough is? Is anyone here afraid of anyone? What have we taken without returning?
Write down a sentence or two each time. After a year, read them back. Read it beside one or two simple numbers you already keep, and each will help you check the other.
Limitations
- Questions about clarity and trust are hard to compare across places and years. Numbers, for all their limits, can be compared.
- Families can answer these questions too kindly, or too harshly. Measuring ourselves has its own blind spots.
- We draw on the goals named in Madhyasth Darshan. Other traditions name progress differently, and may see something we miss.
References
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, मानव लक्ष्य (the human goal), p. 148
- Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 102
