Beyond Development and Subjective Wellbeing : Experimenting With the Dual Necessity Conception of Social Progress

Social progress indices assess wellbeing and sustainable development, and reflect distinct conceptions of social progress. Broadly, such conceptions fall into two categories: ‘subjective’ – the attitudes of individuals, and ‘objective’ – external standards. Our starting point is the ‘dual necessity’ claim, namely that the two conceptions have joint-special significance. Technically, we assume only low compensability between them when representing social progress. Although intuitive, low compensability between subjective and objective aspects is neglected in existing conceptions and measurements of social progress. The paper experiments with measurements of social progress as a composition of the two components (subjective and objective) with a very low degree of substitution. Employing the constant elasticity of substitution function (CES), we empirically demonstrate the ramifications of this approach across assessments and rankings of countries. We show that low substitution measurement, and hence low compensability, matter empirically; particularly, they matter the most for middle-ranked countries