Synthetic Indicators for Modern Societies: Conveying Information, Preserving Complexity

Synthetic indicators and rankings are indeed two of the products that decision-makers most demand from socio-economic statisticians, to the extent that we may say there is an indicator (and often more than one) for just about anything: education, poverty, inequality, well-being, democracy, freedom, health, crime, and sustainability, to name a few. Notwithstanding a long tradition in indicator construction, applied statistics is currently facing major challenges that lead to reconsidering what social indicators are, how they should be designed and built, and even how they should be communicated. These issues are technical, but they are also conceptual. In this short note, we try to highlight, from the point of view of “indicator builders,” the most relevant issues. To do so, we consider some critical keywords.