A Spotlight Report by Peter Day-Milne

Why a society domain?

Without a Society Domain, the Prosperity Index would measure Freedom and Development only. These two aspects of prosperity are fundamental, but we believe that they are not the whole story. A country might be the freest and richest in the world, but if for any reason its citizens were miserable, living their lives without a sense of meaning or purpose, then in our view it would be less than fully prosperous—and we think that most people would agree with us.

For this reason, we have developed the Society Domain. The Society Domain aims to evaluate the strength of states' social fabrics, by which we mean the strength of the constitutive relationships within each state. Our reason for taking this phrase as our prompt is a common-sense one, and one also endorsed by the sociological evidence: people are most likely to flourish when they feel that their lives have meaning and purpose, and they are most likely to do so when they feel that they have places and roles within social groups. In other words, people grow to understand themselves and their vocation(s) within relationships: the deepest and most satisfying answers to the question 'who am I?' are answers such as 'husband', 'father', 'the vicar of X'; 'a Glaswegian', 'a Virginian', 'a Frenchman'. We believe that if we account for the strength of these constitutive relationships, then we greatly reduce the chance that our Index could call a country prosperous when intuitively it is not.

Our approach

To evaluate the strength of these constitutive relationships, we employ a concentric model, starting with the most intimate of the relationships that we believe form a person's sense of self—namely those of the family—and working outwards to the progressively weaker but still self-defining relationships that citizens have with their local communities, their nation or society as a whole, and lastly, with their state.

First, the 'Integrity of Families' pillar aims to measure the strength of family life within a society—not only the strength of families once formed, but also the capacity of the society to foster successful couple-formation, and thus to allow its citizens to enjoy the benefits of family life.

In developing the pillar, we first asked ourselves why human beings naturally feel strong feelings of love and affection for their families. Ultimately, we believe that feel drawn to family life because of its natural end, namely the production and effective rearing of children. It follows that where a society is attaining this twofold end, the natural rewards of family life are likely to follow: stability, love, companionship, and many others.

Amidst a lack of consistent and reliable global data on such things as divorce rates, household composition and domestic abuse, one obvious globally-available clue to the success of a country in producing and rearing children is its fertility rate. But we recognize that a country may have a healthy fertility rate for unhealthy reasons—be they forced marriage; a culture in which, more broadly, women feel unfree; or high infant mortality. Accordingly, we have based the Integrity of Families pillar on the following principle:

Where women are safe and free, few children are dying young, and yet fertility is healthy, there family life can be said to be strong.

One could think of the pillar as being a steeplechase: to do well, a country must clear the fence of women's freedom and safety, then that of infant mortality, and then finally that of fertility.

In our concentric model, the 'Integrity of Communities' pillar comes next. It aims to measure the strength of local communities. Do people trust their neighbours and contribute to the lives of their communities, or do they lead parallel, insular lives of mutual suspicion? To answer this question, we draw on polling data about citizens' sense of purpose and hope, levels of violent crime and theft, and community trust and engagement.

The 'Integrity of Society' pillar aims to assess whether citizens feel that they have common interests and values with their fellow countrymen as such. Is there a cohesive nation, or is the population splintered into various ethnic, social, or other groups that see themselves has having different interests and values? Informally, we might imagine what happens when two fellow citizens meet in a remote foreign country. Do they feel immediately that they have something in common, or (at the other extreme) do they feel instant suspicion? To measure this aspect of national cohesiveness, the pillar draws on expert-assessed data about factionalism, and about the full extent of crime within the state, including organized crime.

Our final pillar—the outermost in our concentric model—is 'Integrity of State'. The rationale of this pillar is that a citizen can gain a further sense of belonging if he feels himself to belong to a society that has some common purposes and interests at the political level. Accordingly, we ask: Is there a functional and reasonably clean state in whose actions and decisions a citizen can feel invested, or is the state unable to secure its hegemony of force, or held in contempt because it is corrupt? Whether or not they elect their leaders, do citizens feel that they have some interest or share in what those leaders do? The pillar tries to measure these things by assessing the state's hegemony of force; the prevalence of corruption within it; and finally the extent of public interest in public life.