Issue A Policy's True Measure

Summary

A Policy's True Measure asks what would happen if social policies in education, health and welfare were designed and monitored at community level in real time. Machine intelligence would help policymakers build and run programmes that adjust continuously, reflect people's diverse characteristics and backgrounds and protect everyone's privacy. A one-size-fits-all approach built on aggregate data can hide realities on the ground, missing gender, disability or cultural differences that matter for effective policy. Excluding people with disabilities can cost up to 7% of GDP in some economies, excluding women could cost $342 trillion by 2050, 708 million women are kept out of work by unpaid care and only 57% of needed gender data exists. Community-level metrics could avoid both blunt national policies and unwieldy individual ones, although they may still misalign with individual indicators in diverse communities.