Metrics / Human Development / Global Policy
Measuring Prosperity Beyond GDP
Solidarity, Agency, Material Gain, and the Environment
0+countries covered by the SAGE dashboard, by its authors' 2022 count
0indexes, read side by side and never added into one score
0%fall in US solidarity in the first SAGE edition, 2007 to 2017, as GDP per capita rose 7%
Executive Summary
Katharina Lima de Miranda and Dennis J. Snower built the SAGE dashboard to measure wellbeing beyond GDP. It puts GDP per capita next to indexes of solidarity (people's ties to one another), agency (their control over their own lives) and environmental sustainability. In a 2023 brief for the T20, the G20's engagement group for think tanks, Colin Mayer and Snower proposed that G20 members measure all four every year.
What GDP measures, and what it leaves out
Simon Kuznets led the first official US estimates of national income, presented to the Senate in 1934 to measure the toll of the Depression. The UN standardized national accounts in 1953, and their output figures, now led by GDP, became the main measure of how countries were doing. Kuznets had warned that a nation's welfare could scarcely be inferred from national income.
Built to measure production
GDP adds up the market value of the final goods and services an economy produces in a given period.
Leaves out solidarity
How connected people are to one another.
Leaves out agency
How much control people have over their own lives.
Leaves out environmental damage
Whether growth uses up natural resources or causes pollution.
Lima de Miranda and Snower describe GDP growth that is not matched by rising solidarity and agency as a decoupling of economic from social prosperity. They read the discontent of people who feel left behind by globalization and technological change as a sign of decoupling. In the first edition of their dashboard, US GDP per capita rose 7% from 2007 to 2017 while the solidarity index fell 11%.
The four SAGE indexes
Lima de Miranda and Snower argue that Homo sapiens succeeded largely through cooperation and niche construction (reshaping its environment). People therefore evolved motives to socialize and to shape their surroundings, and solidarity and agency became fundamental sources of wellbeing. In their account, solidarity rests on communitarianism, agency on classical liberalism, gain on utilitarianism and the environment on environmental ethics. Gain and Environment use existing measures. Solidarity and agency needed new indexes, which the authors revised in 2021.
Solidarity: social belonging
Inward solidarity is the share of people who say they have friends or relatives to count on in times of trouble. Outward solidarity combines survey measures of giving (helping a stranger, donating money, volunteering), satisfaction with efforts to help the poor, and a minority rights index.
Agency: shaping one's own life
Confidence in institutions such as the national government and the courts, perceived freedom to make life choices, the share of workers in vulnerable employment (working on their own account or unpaid in a family business), and life expectancy.
Gain: material prosperity
Measured by GDP per capita.
Environment: sustainability
Measured by the Environmental Performance Index, which scores countries on pollution, emissions, biodiversity and waste.
Mayer and Snower call the four goals “on a par”. Each is better than the others in some respects, and there is no common unit for comparing them.
Dennis J. Snower
Founding President, Global Solutions Initiative; former President, Kiel Institute for the World Economy
Colin Mayer
Emeritus Professor of Management Studies, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
The line comes from Mayer and Snower's 2023 T20 brief. The same brief compares SAGE to an aircraft's instrument panel, where correct altitude does not make up for a shortage of fuel.
How G7 societies responded to the pandemic
In 2020, GDP per capita fell and carbon emissions dropped in every G7 country. Lima de Miranda and Snower found that solidarity and agency rose in some countries and fell in others. In most of them inward solidarity pulled further ahead of outward solidarity, a shift the authors call tribalization.
The authors argue that following distancing rules depends on social cohesion and on people feeling able to act, so societies with high solidarity and agency “may be expected to cope with the pandemic better”.
“Pandemics cannot be effectively controlled through individualistic behavior patterns.” (Lima de Miranda and Snower, PNAS, 2022)
Italy: deep recession, solidarity and agency up
GDP per capita fell 8.6%, the second-largest fall in the G7. Average solidarity rose 4.9% and agency 3.4%, the largest rises in the G7, though Italy's levels of both stayed among the lowest in the group.
Canada: milder recession, outward solidarity and agency down
GDP per capita fell 6.4%. Agency fell 1.3%, the largest fall in the G7, and outward solidarity fell 3.5%.
United Kingdom: deepest recession, outward solidarity down, agency up
GDP per capita fell 10.4% and outward solidarity 8.5%, the largest falls in the G7 on both measures. Agency rose 1.7%.
Where SAGE stands
Statistical offices compile GDP to an agreed international standard and publish it on a fixed schedule. SAGE is a research dashboard built by academics.
Solidarity and agency draw mostly on Gallup World Poll survey answers, alongside statistics on life expectancy and vulnerable employment. Mayer and Snower call the existing measures a “rudimentary version” of what they propose.
The proposal to the G20
Mayer and Snower's June 2023 brief for the T20 makes two recommendations.
At the UN, an expert group set up under the 2024 Pact for the Future recommended in May 2026 that GDP be complemented by a dashboard of indicators. A Beyond GDP Global Alliance of countries and partners began formal operations in April 2026, after its launch at the UN's 2025 Financing for Development conference in Seville.
Who's behind this
What would count as progress
Mayer and Snower write that a country has to advance on all four goals before there are “some grounds for confidence” that people's basic needs and purposes are being met.
In their pandemic study, Lima de Miranda and Snower cite indirect evidence that solidarity and agency respond to policy. They suggest that economic policies “may need to be supplemented by solidarity- and agency-enhancing social policies”, and say a rigorous test of this was beyond their study.
Published by Center for Human Progress (US) Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization