Some Critical Reflections on the Measurement of Social Sustainability and Well-Being in Complex Societies

The aim of this discussion paper is to raise awareness of the conceptual and practical limits of mainstream practices in social measurement and to suggest possible directions for social indicator construction, in view of effectively supporting policies for social sustainability and well-being promotion. We start with a review of the epistemological issues raised by the measurement of social phenomena, investigate the notion of social complexity, and discuss the critical link between it and measurement. We then suggest that social indicators should be primarily designed to build structural syntheses of the data, unfolding the patterns and stylizing the complexity of social phenomena, rather than computed pursuing numerical precision, through hardly interpretable aggregated measures. This calls for tools and algorithms capable of rendering structural information, preserving the essential traits of complexity and overcoming the limitations of classical aggregation procedures. We provide some examples along this line, using real data pertaining to regional well-being in OECD countries.