Relationship to Social Reporting Movement
The problem of selecting appropriate measures of societal well-being, while
novel to many advocates of governmentwide performance planning, is familiar
within another professional community, often known as the social indicator
movement or the social reporting movement. This movement has its roots
in attempts in the 1950s by agencies of the United Nations to define and measure
what was then referred to as the “standard of living”(Rothenbacher 1993,
2). However, the movement truly gained momentum in the United States in
the next decade, driven in large part by the frustration of many policy analysts
over the neglect of serious social problems. Political leaders, these analysts
thought, suffered from “economic philistinism” (Gross 1966, ix): a tendency
to equate societal well-being with progress on a handful of macroeconomic
indicators, such as growth in gross domestic product (GDP).
The remedy to this problem was thought to be the development of systems
of social statistics, built on a broader set of indicators of societal welfare.
Early advocates, such as Mancur Olson, hoped that performance on
Issues Associated with the Implementation of Performance Monitoring 9
these neglected measures might be reported regularly in a social report comparable
in form to the Economic Report of the President (U.S. Department of
Health Education 1969). Social reports, it was thought, would reveal “the
social costs of growth” (Noll 1998) and change the course of policy making.
Olson later said,