July 13, 2011 — It’s been more than 20 years since the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) started publishing annual Human Development Reports “with the goal of putting people at the center of development, going beyond income to assess people’s long-term well-being.” Building on this model, many countries have adopted or adapted a “human development index,“ and, last year, the Affordable Care Act called for the creation of a “key national indicators” system in the U.S.
But Congress has yet to authorize funding for the project, and simply establishing an indicator system is no guarantee that its measures will become significant considerations in the crafting of public policy. The fundamental issue: do indicator systems work by attempting to “insulate” them from politics, or by attempting to have them do battle in the political arena by challenging those who don’t accept the importance of the indicators and by promulgating specific policy recommendations? If the answer were engagement, what steps would make a key national indicator system effective?
Limitations of GDP
The limitations of using GDP as the primary measure of a society’s progress have been well documented. The figure does not differentiate between goods and services that are beneficial and those that are not. For example, producing more cigarettes (and thus more disease), and producing more gasoline for cars stuck on the expressway (and thus speeding destructive climate change), both lead to an uptick in GDP; on the contrary, the work of the stay-at-home parent who provides care for his or her child every day is treated by the GDP as zero. And GDP neither indicates whether economic benefits are flowing disproportionately to certain groups, classes, or interests within a society, nor says much about the subjective well being of a society’s population.
In the U.S., there have been many attempts on the regional, state, and national levels to go beyond GDP. For example, on the state level, an indicator system was first put in place in Oregon in 1991. On the municipal level, one city that has used human development indicators is Jacksonville, Florida. On a broader scope, the not-for-profit American Human Development Project has produced “The Measure of America,” its implementation of a human development index for the country. (Remapping Debate’s previous edition featured a video interview with Sarah Burd-Sharps, co-author of “The Measure of America”).
But an official system for the U.S. is still at the starting gate, and serious questions remain as to how to maximize its efficacy.
If you build it, will they come?
Chris Hoenig is a senior adviser to the presidents of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and president of State of the USA, a nonprofit founded in 2007 with the goal of creating a comprehensive national indicator system. After passage of the Affordable Care Act, State of the USA partnered with the NAS to prepare for implementing the key national indicator system.
If Congress appropriates funding for the indicator system and the project goes forward, the NAS will identify the human development areas to be addressed by the key national indicators, determine the measures that will be used, and choose where the data will come from (see box).
The legislation calls for the data generated to be published on a freely accessible website. Hoenig wants the site to be a place where an individual can browse information about his community and a researcher can have access to a deep array of data to conduct sophisticated analyses.
“If you can focus on and select what are the most important things to learn about, then you can begin the process of goal-setting, you can begin the process of comparing, you can begin the process of cause and effect, you can begin the process of analyzing root cause,” Hoenig said.
But other attempts to implement key indicator systems have shown that it is not sufficient to simply release data and hope for the best.
“People think you can put these things together and publish them and then something will happen,” said Alex Michalos, a senior advisor to the Canadian Index of Wellbeing project, an effort to create a national index for Canada that goes beyond GDP. “But that doesn’t happen.”
“I don’t think there will be uptake unless there’s a strong communication and education effort made,” Michalos said.
In a June report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) enumerated several ways the systems are vulnerable to failure: it is difficult to sustain funding for them; stakeholders are liable to lose interest in the project; the systems are susceptible to accusations of bias; and they can tend to languish in obscurity without reaching a wide audience.
How will this time be different?
Hoenig says that he is hoping that the U.S. key national indicator system can overcome those problems through the quality of its data and through outreach to a wide spectrum of intended users: the public, researchers, businesses, nonprofits, the media. If the information is comprehensive, transparent, and presented in an engaging way — through interactive graphs and charts on the website that reveal relationships in the data — then, he asserts, it will earn the trust and confidence of the American public and it will be adopted as an authoritative reference.
It is also important that the indicator system not be seen as the product of a single party or branch of government, Hoenig said. He said the provision in the Affordable Care Act establishing the key national indicator system was crafted with that in mind. The NAS was chosen to select the data to be used as indicators because it is known as a nonpartisan institution, he said. And the legislation established a Commission on Key National Indicators to oversee the indicator system, with members of the commission nominated by the majority and minority leaders in both chambers of Congress.
Hoenig said that although some indicator programs have successfully integrated data gathering with interpreting that data and making recommendations, Congress did not task the key national indicator system with making policy recommendations. That would have to be left to policymakers, researchers, advocacy groups, businesses and the media.
Some representatives of comprehensive indicator systems told Remapping Debate that if they were to make policy recommendations it would undermine their mission.
Andrea Whitsett, project manager of Arizona Indicators, a benchmark initiative managed by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University, said that the need was to “build something…that becomes over time a trusted resource that is perceived as neutral and objective: then it advances that civil dialogue because people can start from a common data point.”
But can that model work in the context of human development measures?
Joseph Sirgy, a professor at Virginia Tech and the editor of the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, explained that, historically, those who push to look beyond economic well-being as the primary indicator of the country’s development ”are labeled leftists.”
Support for a national indicators system has tended to depend on “how the pendulum has been swinging back and forth in Congress whether the Democrats have dominated the agenda versus the Republicans,” Sirgy said.
During the Carter administration there was a push for a social indicator system at the national level, but it was “swept under the rug” during subsequent Republican administrations, he said, “the reason being the conservatives labeled it as a leftist agenda.”
Developing measures is invariably intertwined with politics
Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, who was nominated to sit on the Commission on Key National Indicators in December by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said it is difficult to disentangle politics from indicators. “What you measure really does drive your priorities, and people obviously know that. And so this question very quickly becomes a political question,” he said.
Heintz, who made clear that he was speaking on his own behalf and not that of the commission, said public education about indicator systems can counteract demagogic efforts to marginalize such systems by enabling people to better hold politicians accountable for their decisions. In Heintz’s view, the broad public exposure to economic data that drive policymaking (GDP, unemployment, inflation) significantly shapes citizen attitudes towards policymakers’ decisions, and influences how citizens lobby their legislators and how they vote. If human development indicators came to have equivalent exposure, then those indicators, too, Heinz claimed, would become part of a public policy dialogue.
Indicators give people “the opportunity to use them as levers of accountability,” Heintz said. “People can go testify on the Hill on legislation and say, ‘As you’re considering an economic stimulus program, have you looked at the following data that is part of the key national indicators, and how does your stimulus program respond to data sets x, y, and z?’”
“If policy is going to be in part influenced by these measures, you want people to have an understanding of that,” Heintz continued. “If they have an understanding of the indicators and the data that is driving the decision making, they will be better prepared to exercise their responsibilities as citizens.”
How to bring the message home
Kristen Lewis, co-director of the American Human Development Project, said that how the benchmark data is presented to the public can make a big difference in how it is received.
“If you’re trying to persuade someone and you give them a black-and-white typed report that is 50 pages long and at the back has 30 tables that make your point really well with numbers and you give that to a regular person, and you try to show them that’s why they should change the policy…they are not really going to be persuaded,” Lewis said. “You have to…use the numbers to tell a convincing story.”
The timing of how the information is released can also make a difference, Lewis said. GDP, for example, is published every quarter. But with life expectancy or other health and education indicators, “there’s nothing like that — there’s no fanfare,” Lewis said. “That’s very problematic.”
Lewis said for indicators such as life expectancy that don’t change much from year to year, it wouldn’t make sense to publish them as frequently. But other indicators, such as the birth weight of babies, are amenable to short-term policy change, she said.
Birth weight is a “very sensitive indicator for the health of the population,” Lewis said. “So if that is collected and published, and policymakers use that and talk about wanting to change it and build policy around it and actually use it to measure change, then that would be great [and] a lot would happen in terms of population health.”
Karen Hruby, executive director of Truckee Meadows Tomorrow, a nonprofit that oversees indicator data in northwestern Nevada, said the media has a crucial role to play as well. “The more media is on board and actually understands the indicators, the bigger the chance that the data will actually be reported and in such a fashion that the community can actually engage around whatever the topics are that they’re bringing forward,” she said.
The Reno Gazette-Journal has used indicator data to examine the underlying causes of problems affecting the region, Hruby said. In its reporting on the region’s economic troubles, for example, the newspaper has looked at how education and innovation factor in. “It’s nice to say we’re going to get out of economic slump here if we just create jobs, but nobody’s got the magic wand,” she said. “They started to dig deeper and say, ‘What’s the reason behind why we don’t have more jobs?’” she continued. “‘Let’s talk about what other problems do we have? Do we have an educated workforce. No. OK how do we address that?’ It starts to go from there.”
The paper held forums with members of the community to discuss solutions to the problem. Eventually, policymakers began to show up and participate at the forums, including county commissioners and city council members, Hruby said. After community members said it was important for the region to develop alternative sources of energy, Washoe County and the cities of Reno and Sparks all set renewable energy targets, she said.
Oregon: good intentions, but how much progress?
Oregon’s indicator program, Oregon Benchmarks, has been widely perceived as one of the preeminent indicator systems in the country since it was adopted early in the 1990s, but it has not always been supported (see box), and questions remain about how well-integrated the benchmarks have been with policy development.
According to Oregon state representative Jefferson Smith, the Oregon Benchmarks program has not been sufficiently linked as a matter of law and structure to policymaking. “We get these benchmarks, great, but it’s not doing enough to inform our policy choices.”
On July 6, Oregon governor John Kitzhaber signed a bill sponsored by Smith that directs the state’s Department of Administrative Services to integrate Oregon Benchmarks with the legislative budget and policy process. The bill does not specify how that process should be implemented, but Smith had his own ideas for how to go about it.
To raise awareness of the benchmarks among policymakers, the indicator system should have a lobbyist or several lobbyists to inform them about how policy initiatives would affect benchmarks, Smith said.
“There needs to be talented human time applied to communicating with decision makers,” Smith said. “I can imagine it being a lobbyist who went around and met with everybody and said, ‘Hey, here’s some of the stuff that we’re thinking about, here’s what the indicators are saying now, here’s what the policy impacts of the following pieces of legislation might be.’”
Hruby from the Truckee Meadows nonprofit said she thought having a lobbyist dedicated to indicators would be helpful because she did not have time to do that work herself. “I did my fair part sending as much indicator data as I could…in our last legislative session, related to particular bills,” Hruby said. “But you’ve got to have the time to track the bills to do that, which requires a lobbyist.”
Smith offered his view that, “I don’t think one thing will make [Oregon Benchmarks] sufficiently linked to policymaking. I think it’s going to take several things.”
Among his other suggestions:
• having all incoming state legislators go through an orientation process to familiarize them with the benchmarks and thereby help them start thinking about policy ideas that could address problems identified by the indicators.
• having the benchmarks be linked to the governor’s state of the state address. (“Imagine a State of the State address that wasn’t merely a few generalized plaudits and troubles and then an announcement of the governor’s favorite next initiatives,” Smith said. “What if it also included an evaluation of where we are?”)
• having a required impact statement that would show how the proposed legislation would influence benchmarks. (Smith gave the example in the context of an appropriations bill: “If we defund higher education by another 10 percent, that’s going to reduce the number of college-educated people we have by blank percent.”)