Auditing the measurement quality of societal progress: A six-criterion framework applied to 99 indicators

Policymakers and researchers need societal indicators they can inspect, obtain data for, and trust to be up-to-date. We performed an audit of candidate measures of human progress, benchmarking 99 widely used indicators spanning domains critical to human welfare and societal change: civil liberties, climate, economy, education, peace and war, public health, technology, and well-being. We drew 62 indicators from expert nominations, augmented by 37 further commonly used indicators supplied by our research team. We audited these indicators against six basic criteria social scientists rely on as prerequisites for measurement validity: definability, quantifiability, public data availability, global population coverage, documentation, and temporal resolution. Only 32% of indicators (43% of those with public data) met all six criteria. Documentation and temporal resolution were the most common failures, and we found no reliable differences across domains. Our findings suggest that many areas of human progress and societal change rely on markers that often cannot be audited, raising questions about the empirical foundation of global policy initiatives, and pointing to ways to improve measurement of global progress.