In recent write-ups I addressed the topic of measuring economic output as well as the need of measurement for balancing systems and achieving "sustainability".

It seems the political and academic discourse slowly but surely gets comfortable with the notion of replacing, or at least complementing GDP as the magic figure of economic development. The benefits of a new measure could be significant - and lead us a way out of the growth trap we find ourselves in way too deep. To quote Joseph Stiglitz at the WEF 2016 in Davos: “What we measure informs what we do. And if we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re going to do the wrong thing.”

But there is an additional aspect to the way we measure our own economic, political, and societal behavior and achievements. In 2010, a British historian called Ian Morris wrote an insightful book titled "Why the west rules, for now"*. The really interesting thing about it is less the actual answer to this question, but the approach Morris has taken. Not only did he take into account findings and hypotheses of many different academic fields (archeology, anthropology, history, biology, and even theology). In order to compare eastern and western civilizations over thousands of years, he also created a "social development index". The index is made from a mix of four traits - energy capture, organizational capacity (in the form of urbanization as a proxy), information processing, and capacity to make war.

This index is very specific to Morris' research question, but it reveals something more about the way we measure ourselves. The people in the ancient Rome or the people in the Shang dynasty might not ever have thought about how Morris was going to measure their "development". And nor does our society have a discourse about how we will be measured 5000 years from now by our descendants, or some other race that has the means to look back in time through various means of research. But if our societal standard was measured thousands of years from now, it would most likely not be based on GDP figures stored in a hard-drive, derived from complex statistical surveys. They would measure us based on what will be left behind from our society - the ruins of our cities, the skeletons and their signs of healthy and unhealthy lifestyles, the changes in flora & fauna during our lifetime, or the pollution "stored" in the layers of ice at the poles.

The question of "how we want to be measured" should not only guide us in defining our measures of economic development, but also the ones of our personal lives. We will not be measured by some internal criteria that we defined for ourselves, but rather by what is left of us once we're gone. We will be measured by what lives on through the impact we have made on our environment, on the people we have influenced, and the changes we were a part of.

To do the right thing, we need to measure the right things - as a society and as individuals.

*This book is an absolute treat for anyone trying to understand connections between different fields of research. Arguments are very well derived and the approach in explanations is as methodological as the research itself.