If You Were a Minister

Picture a minister on a Monday morning with two numbers in front of her.

The first is GDP. It went up a little. She knows what to do with that one. There is a paragraph in a speech already written around it.

The second is her country's human development position. It held. She knows what to do with that one too.

Neither number has ever made her uneasy. Not because the country is in good shape, but because neither one has ever asked her a question she could not already answer.

Then a third number goes on the desk, and she stops.

It does not say how much the country produced. It does not say how well the country provides. It says whether the people doing the producing are all right while they do it. The answer is no, and the first two numbers gave her no warning.

Her first instinct is that the number is wrong. Her second is to find out whether anyone else has seen it.

So she does what ministers do. She asks around.

A counterpart in a considerably richer country tells her, without much enthusiasm, that his score is worse than hers. She had not expected that. Another, from a country her own officials describe as still developing, reports a score near the top and says she is not sure she believes it. A third has not looked yet and would rather not.

By the end of the week she has learned something the number itself never told her. Nobody is comfortable. Every one of them had assumed this was a problem belonging to countries unlike their own.

What she wants to know now is whether her country is the exception, or whether this is simply what the world looks like when you measure it this way.

It is the second one.

What the third number is

It is built from two scores, and both come from asking ordinary people about their own lives rather than from asking governments about theirs.

The first score is flourishing. Are people's lives going well? Do they have real work, and does that work mean anything to them? Gallup has put those questions to national samples in more than a hundred countries for twenty years.

The second score is the drive to create. Are people starting things? Do they see opportunities worth taking, and will they take the risk? The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor has asked that for twenty-five years.

There is one adjustment on that second score. Starting a business because you saw a chance is not the same as starting one because there is no other way to eat. The second kind counts, but at a discount. A country cannot score well on the drive to create by having no jobs.

The rule is simple: balance matters

Imagine two countries. One scores 50 on both sides. The other scores 90 on one and 10 on the other. A simple average gives both of them 50. They are plainly not in the same position.

So GDH does not average. It uses a geometric mean, which gives less credit to imbalance. The balanced country stays at 50. The 90/10 country falls to 30.

A strong side cannot hide a weak one.

Two scores, one number, from data anyone can check.

She reads that twice, because she already knows her country is not doing well. That was never in doubt. What she assumed was that she knew why.

Then she looks at her own two scores. One of them is respectable. The other is not. And it is not the side she has spent three years working on.

That is the moment the number earns its place on the desk. It did not tell her the country was struggling. She knew that on Sunday night. It told her she had been solving the wrong half of it.

What it says

Almost nobody does both. Six countries out of forty-three score above 60. The other thirty-seven are carrying a weak side. This is the finding that surprised us most, because it was not what we expected to find. Doing both well is not the normal condition of a nation. It is the exception.

Money does not buy it. Switzerland has the second-highest income of any country measured and ranks twenty-fifth. Chile lives on about a sixth of Switzerland's income and ranks third. Uruguay ranks fourth. Wealth clearly helps a country do both. It does not deliver either one on its own, and it does not protect a country that has stopped doing one of them.

The two barely move together. It seems obvious that a country where people live well is also a country where people build things. Development policy has assumed exactly that for fifty years. Get a country richer and steadier, and the creating will take care of itself.

Line them up and it does not hold. Take two countries whose people live equally well, and you still cannot say which of the two is building more. The link is there. It is just far too weak to lean on, and fifty years of policy have been leaning on it.

One country is strong on both. The United States ranks first, high on flourishing and highest on the drive to create. That matters for reading the rest of the table. This is not a measure that punishes wealth or rewards poverty. It punishes imbalance. Imbalance is simply what almost every country has.

Two ways to be out of balance

South Korea creates at 80. That is second in the world, a rounding error behind the United States. Its people flourish at 44, which is twenty-sixth.

Korea still ranks seventh, near the top of a measure that is telling it something is wrong. The engine is running ahead of the people inside it.

Norway is the mirror image, almost exactly. Its people flourish at 77, third in the world. Its drive to create is 38. On flourishing alone it would stand third. On both together it stands eighth.

Korea is running too hard. Norway has nothing asking it to run. Opposite problems. Same verdict, from the same rule.

That is the rule doing its work. Neither country gets to hide its weak side behind its strong one.

Mexico shows what that costs. Its people flourish at 70. Its drive to create is 11. Average the two and Mexico sits eighteenth. Use the geometric mean and it sits thirtieth. The second number is the honest one.

What a minister can now ask

She goes back to her counterparts at the end of the month with something she did not have at the start of it.

Before this, two questions were available. How much are we producing? How well are our people provided for?

Here are three that were not.

Are we asking our people to keep producing without asking what it costs them?

Are we comfortable enough that nobody needs to start anything anymore?

Do we need more new businesses, or better lives for the people already running the ones we have?

Most governments already suspect which of those is theirs. What they have not had is anything to point at while they argue about it.

Now they do. She still does not know what to do about her number. She knows which argument to have, and she can have it with something on the table.

Now imagine you are that minister

Your country is in the table below.

You already know, more or less, whether it is doing well. What you may not know is which of the two sides has been carrying it, and which one you have been quietly assuming would take care of itself.

Find it. Look at the two scores before you look at the rank.

The Measure of Nations is a series on how economies measure themselves, and what those measurements miss.

Edited with Claude (Anthropic).