The Latin word progressus came to Spanish as progress . The term can refer to advancement or growth. Social , meanwhile, is that linked to society: a group of individuals who live in a certain territory with common norms and values.
We speak of social progress to refer to a positive change in a community that allows its members to increase their quality of life . Social progress is associated with an improvement in economic, political and social conditions .
As an ideal, all governments aim to foster social progress. In practice, however, this development is not always achieved and it is even possible that citizens suffer a detriment to their well-being.
Public policies are the most effective way to promote social progress. In any case, there are non-governmental organizations and even independent human beings who exercise activism so that more and more children and adults have access to better conditions.
Social progress, in short, is the evolution of society as a whole towards an ideal stage with positive effects on people's well-being. To measure the fulfillment of this objective, an indicator known as the social progress index is used.
The social progress index, in turn, is built from multiple variables that reflect development opportunities and the satisfaction of essential needs, for example. The NGO Social Progress Imperative (known in Spanish as Progreso Social Imperativo ) publishes a ranking with the measurements, which in 2018 presented Norway as the country with the best results in terms of social progress.
Thanks to the measurement of the social progress index we can also appreciate the degree to which each country strives to satisfy the environmental needs of people, beyond the specifically social ones. And this is very relevant, since if there were a country with the best job and student opportunities but immersed in the most extreme environmental pollution, its citizens would not be able to take advantage of the benefits one hundred percent because their health would not accompany them.
Fifty-four indicators are used to measure the relative performance of each country, which are grouped into three main groups: opportunities for progress, fundamental well-being and basic needs. This index is based on the theory of economists Joseph Stiglitz, Douglass Cecil North and Amartya Sen. It is important to explain that the well-being of the society that the index measures takes into account the results directly and independently of economic factors .
When talking about well-being, in the context of social progress, we must include concepts such as health, sanitation and shelter, which must be complemented by inclusion, equality, security, sustainability and personal freedoms. The project of the Imperative Social Progress organization originated in 2010, when several leaders of the social sector made the decision to develop a more efficient measure for the evaluation of social progress.
One of the aspects that is usually overlooked when talking about the social progress index is that it gives the different countries evaluated the possibility to compare their performance with others and learn from them. It is far from being a table in which only the first ones shine while the last ones humiliate themselves; The ultimate objective of its founders is for each and every human being to improve their living conditions.
When evaluating the three groups of indicators mentioned above, each one is delved into to observe each of its components, which make the tree more complex the closer it is observed.