ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Genuine Progress Index

The genuine progress index (GPI) is a way to measure how well a country, state, or city is doing. We all want to be happy and healthy, right? Well, the GPI helps us figure out if we are on the right track towards being happy and healthy.

Let's say you have a toy that you really like playing with. You might think that having more toys would make you even happier, but that's not always true. Sometimes having more toys means you have to spend more time cleaning them up or you might feel like you are missing out on something else because you are always playing with your toys. The same goes for a country. A country might have a lot of things that look good, like new buildings or fancy cars, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the people are happy or healthy.

The GPI takes into account things like how much pollution there is, how much time people spend volunteering, how much inequality there is between rich and poor, and many other factors that contribute to our well-being. These factors are all added up to give a score that shows how well a country is actually doing instead of just how many toys it has.

So imagine if you were trying to figure out how happy you were. You wouldn't just count how many toys you have, you would also think about how much fun you had playing with your friends or how much you enjoyed your favorite food. The GPI does the same thing for countries, it looks at all the things that make people happy and healthy, not just how much money they have or how many cool things they own.

In summary, the Genuine Progress Index is a way to measure how well a country is doing by looking at how happy and healthy the people who live there are, rather than just how many buildings or expensive things it has.