Methodology

The research team had originally considered developing the CMU Tartan Index of Progress (TIP) in several stages with each emphasizing different aspects of sustainable development goals. The first stage of TIP (or TIP 1.0) would have covered the most basic aspect, which is the economic development as measured by Gross Domestic Product. However, to address the part of the limitations of GDP, the team would have needed to introduce the effects of income inequality when calculating disposable income and also include the value of household work. TIP 1.5.1 then would have been built upon the base of TIP 1 in which we would have included the effects of environmental pollution to offset the potential issues relating to externalities in TIP 1.0. TIP 1.5.2 would have included more aspects of social development, in which we would have examined the effects of social inequality, mental health, and the values of education. TIP 2.0 would have combined TIP 1.5.1 and TIP 1.5.2 to build a comprehensive picture of the world development stage. For the next few stages of TIP, the team would have included indexes that account for the level of sustainability in the world development. However, this approach was found to be less preferable than the following method because of concerns regarding double-counting certain factors and other problems the more levels we added.

The team’s current intention is to reorganize the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (found here), which include societal objectives such as “Zero Hunger” and “Quality Education”, to create broader categories which could each individually be measured by multiple pre existing indicators. For example, one broad category may include concerns relating to the environment, which could be measured by such metrics as CO2 levels in the atmosphere or quantity of waste produced annually. These indices will be weighted based on either general consensus among researchers or preferential ordering algorithms. Additionally, each index will be adjusted to become a coefficient between 0 and 1, calculated as in the HDI before 2010. A custom function may even be added to the website at some point in the future in order to allow users to consider versions of the indicator which weight different elements in ways chosen by the user. The mathematical calculations of the combination of these indices will be such that each element is important, and that while one poor measurement cannot ruin a country’s indicator, it will have a larger negative effect than would be the case with a simple sum. Such measurements will be taken into consideration in the higher levels of the stage system of the indicator in order to enhance the diversity of elements accounted for in the indicator.

Currently, we collapsed 16 out of 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals into 4 categories: Economy, Environment, Health and Justice, and we are using one pre existing indicators to represent each one. At our current stage of research, we eliminated the goal of "Partnership for the Goals", which called for strong global partnership and corporations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), from our calculation for the obvious reason that it will be hard to quantify the extent of achieving this goal for individual countries.

Economy → GDP per capita (most recent update: 2018)

Environment → Ecological Footprint (most recent update: 2016)

Health → Life Expectancy (most recent update: 2019)

Justice → Social Justice Index (most recent update: 2019, available only for countries in the EU and OECD)