Measuring Progress

Measuring Economic Progress

Economists have been inquiring into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations for centuries,1 but the regular and systematic construction of official quantitative measures of relative economic progress is a phenomenon of recent decades. A key role in this transformation was played by Colin Clark, who held that ‘[c]omparisons of economic welfare between one community and another, one econom...

Measuring Global Educational Progress

Measuring Progress in Coevolutionary Competition

Evolution, as trial-and-error based learning methods, usually relies on the repeatability of an experience: Different behavioral alternatives are tested and compared with each other. But agents acting on real environments may not be able to choose which experience to live. Instead, the environment provides varying initial conditions for each trial. In competitive games for example, it is diffic...

Discussion of Measuring Economic Progress

One of the strongest motives in life is the desire to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. In economic debate, this tendency is reflected in a concern with international rankings of various kinds. These rankings are frequently used to bolster a variety of spurious arguments. A typical form of the argument is ‘Australia has declined relative to country X on scale Y, and we should therefore adopt policy Z...

Measuring progress in global health

It is a pleasure to write the editorial for this issue of Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene. This special issue accompanies the now biennial, 3-day meeting of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (RSTMH), which will take place at Oxford Town Hall (St Aldate’s, Oxford, OX1 1BX) from 25–27 September 2014. On assuming office, one of the first presidenti...