The latest alternative to GDP does something interesting: it ignores money. That’s not because money doesn’t matter—it’s because money is only as good as whatever it can buy. Every few months, someone comes up with a new alternative to gross domestic product, the ubiquitous measure of national success that even its inventor never embraced. This month the respected Harvard professor Michael Porter, father of the catchphrase “shared value,” jumped in the game with an index of his own: the Social Progress Index. Here’s Porter’s guiding principle: Instead of making any attempt to balance financial metrics, such as income, against social outcomes, such as clean water, SPI simply measures the outcomes. As reported by the Guardian, Porter “believes past indices have failed because they have tried to mix economic metrics with social metrics.” The problem with this system, of course, is that everyone wants to make his own list of desirable outcomes.