Gross domestic product per capita is a good proxy for economic prowess, but as long as environmental degradation, increased military budgets and other "defensive expenditures" add dollars to the gross domestic product, equating it with societal well-being is woefully misleading.
Individual and societal well-being are critical indicators of social sustainability.
However, the necessary cross-disciplinary research needed to transform raw data and information into useful intelligence and knowledge to improve the planet's environmental, economic and societal well-being is still constrained by disciplinary and organizational silos and legacy concepts.
Sociologist Phil Zuckerman analyzed previous social science research on secularity and non-belief, and concluded that societal well-being is positively correlated with irreligion.
The implication is that the decrease in societal well-being may be far larger than that indicated by conventional GDP measures -- numbers that already are bleak enough, with most countries showing that real (inflation-adjusted) per capita income is lower today than before the crisis -- a lost half-decade.
Policy makers world-wide are increasingly interested in promoting and measuring societal well-being, which is a dynamic, multi-faceted concept with social and psychological dimensions, overlapping with measures of quality of life (QOL) [ 1- 3].
We note that measuring how patterns of sentiment compare with societal measures of well being would also be possible [38].
Separating the true signal from the gigantic amount of noise is neither easy nor straightforward, but it is a challenge that must be tackled if information is ever to be translated into societal well-being.
"Separating the true signal from the gigantic amount of noise is neither easy nor straightforward," they conclude, "but it is a challenge that must be tackled if information is ever to be translated into societal well-being".
Maybe the only way for our Citizen Confidence and societal well-being to remain intact is to set up another table.
This can have a severe impact on both individual and societal well-being as it has been noted that for example ' fear of exposure can result in significant worker absenteeism' [ 35].
