:What is progress and what is not progress? We can talk about progress in lots of different arenas; we will focus primarily on economic and scientific progress, but also make brief reference to cultural and moral progress. In our discussion, we want to distinguish, especially, between overall, long-term progress and narrower, shorter-term progress or regress. We will refer to these as “global” and “local” progress, respectively. Of course, one can also regress; therefore, we will also look at instances where progress, along some dimension, slows or even moves backwards. Generally, such regress is local, and often still in a context of broader, global progress. In scientific progress, for example, there are many instances of short-term progress which, if not completely discarded or disproved, are at least substantially modified or fundamentally challenged. And yet, those research paths, even when later abandoned, still contributed to the overall progress of the field. In that sense, the regress (that is, rejection or modification of previous theories) is corrected by, but not in conflict with, the overall progress. In the case of economic progress, the concept of regress usually takes on a different form in which things that aren’t advancing progress don’t necessarily stop it, but are simply retarding progress — that is, making the rate of progress less efficient. The consequence, we suggest, is that when talking about economic progress, objections to certain consequences of economic progress (for instance, income inequality — a type of regress, in our terminology) should not be cordoned off and dealt with independently, but should be incorporated into the way we think about economic progress itself — as instances of local regress within a context of global progress. We explore the effects of these different relations between progress and regress to suggest some of the challenges those seeking to broaden the standard measure, GDP, to incorporate other social values of well-being will face moving forward.

中文翻译：

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进步与退步：了解复杂的社会措施及其权衡

: 什么是进步，什么不是进步？我们可以谈论许多不同领域的进展；我们将主要关注经济和科学进步，但也会简要提及文化和道德进步。在我们的讨论中，我们特别想区分总体的、长期的进步和狭隘的、短期的进步或倒退。我们将这些分别称为“全球”和“本地”进展。当然，也可以退步；因此，我们还将研究某些方面的进展放缓甚至倒退的情况。一般来说，这种倒退是局部的，而且通常仍处于更广泛的全球进步的背景下。例如，在科学进步中，有许多短期进步的例子，如果没有完全抛弃或反驳，至少受到实质性的修改或根本性的挑战。然而，这些研究路径，即使后来被放弃，仍然为该领域的整体进步做出了贡献。从这个意义上说，倒退（即对先前理论的拒绝或修改）被整体进步所纠正，但不与整体进步相冲突。在经济进步的情况下，倒退的概念通常采用不同的形式，其中没有推动进步的事物不一定会阻止它，而只是阻碍进步——也就是说，使进步的速度降低效率。我们建议，结果是，在谈论经济进步时，对经济进步的某些后果的反对意见（例如，收入不平等——用我们的术语来说是一种倒退）不应该被封锁和独立处理，但应该纳入我们思考经济进步本身的方式——作为全球进步背景下的局部倒退的例子。我们探讨了进步和倒退之间这些不同关系的影响，以提出那些寻求扩大标准衡量标准 GDP 以纳入其他社会福祉价值的人在前进时将面临的一些挑战。