Review by Ralph R. Widner, ISP President and member of US Office of Management and Budget Advisory Committee on Social Indicators, 1976

One of the principal interests–and debates–in panetics is how to measure human suffering. Is it increasing or decreasing? While the world is doing a better and better job of using economic indicators to help guide decisions and policies, we are a still a long way from applying non-economic indicators of the human condition in the same way.

One of the professed goals of American society, expressed in the preamble to its Declaration of Independence, is the "pursuit of happiness." How do we measure progress toward such a goal?

Ever since the Hoover Administration, there have been efforts perodically to complement annual reports on the economic performance and condition of the country with social reports of comparable scope and utility. During the Hoover Administration, the classic, Recent Social Trends in the United States, was prepared covering many non-economic aspects of the nation’s condition. This was never followed up during the New Deal. It was only well after World War II, that the idea of a Social Report re-surfaced within the national government, ironically at the urging of NASA. In 1966, a study Toward a Social Report, was released. Then in 1973, 1976 and 1980, prototypicalSocial Indicators reports were issued by the US government. All this was discontinued by the Reagan Administration.

Now, with support from the Ford Foundation, Marc Miringoff and Marque-Luisa Miringoff, along with Sandra Opdycke, at Fordham University’s Institute for Innovation in Social Policy are trying to rekindle the effort. With a distinguished 23-member Working Group on Social Indicators, they have produced The Social Health of the Nation; How America Is Really Doing. Part a compendium of social indicators, part a well-framed argument for the need for an annual national Social Report on a level comparable to that of the President’s Annual Economic Report, their book makes a cogent case.

Despite professions in the President’s Economic Report since 1995 of "exceptional" performance in the nation’s economy, using nine social indicators aggregated as an "Index of Social Health", the Miringoff’s have developed an Index of Social Health that shows a steady decline when contrasted with Gross Domestic Product over the period 1959 to 1996.

Indicators that show improvement of the period 1970-96 include infant mortality, high school drop outs, the number of elderly in poverty, and life expectancy. Those that have worsened include child abuse, child poverty, youth suicide, health care coverage, wages, inequality, and violent crime. Those that show changing trends over the period are teenage drug use, teenage births, alcohol-related traffic fatalities, affordable housing, and unemployment.

Very usefully, the Miringoff’s provide a tabular summary of the status of social reporting in countries around the world.

The Miringoff’s also have done an outstanding job contrasting the status of development among social indicators with that of economic indicators. While many economic indicators are collected on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Almost all social indicators are collected only an annual basis at best. And their use is fragmentary and single-purpose.

Clearly, panetics shares a common interest with this valiant band of scholars.

We might ask: what is the difference between indicators of human suffering that some in the field of panetics are attempting to devise and many of the social indicators that the Miringoff’s describe? Are these not measures of the same thing going by another name?

Unquestionably, social indicators of the sort espoused by the Fordham Working Group, as well as by other teams working at the World Bank and on the United Nation’s Human Development Report, are fundamental building blocks for the decision-making applications that panetics is attempting to devise.

Yet a fundamental point for those engaged in panetics is that a single-purpose indicator–such as infant mortality, for example–can not by itself be a useful guide to decision-making. As Dr. Glenn Geelhoed, president of the International Society for Panetics, points out in a new book, interventions undertaken on the basis of a single indicator may wind up increasing rather than decreasing human suffering. His own efforts to reduce deaths from iodine deficiencies in an isolated central African population, for example, resulted in a population boom that could not be supported by the food resources available. Death by starvation increased.

Certainly panetics should join forces with such efforts as the Fordham Working Group on Social Indicators. The Miringoff’s book is highly recommended as an update on the state of work in this urgently important field.

But those of us tilling the fields of panetics must help take such efforts to the next level of application by investigating and developing ways to make effective use of them in the multi-dimensional realm of decision-making.