comment: >
  
  By the amount of things a citizen is allowed to do without legal action being taken out on them for it. Otherwise just minimizing how much they negatively impact other countries
context: How well fed people are, how educated, how long they live, the quality of life, and the amount of children each family can have comfortably
  Crime and justice are big, as are ethics >
  
  The life experience of the poorest of the citizens. If a government or ruler cannot provide a basic living for a human being then that government/ruler and society have failed. A basic living includes three elements:
  ✓ A safe, comfortable place to live.
  ✓ Enough food for sustenance.
  ✓ Healthcare to sustain life.
  If a government or ruler is incapable of providing these three elements then they are failing and are subject to change. I await your angry downvotes. Thank you for attending my TED talk. >
  
  Wait no, he's got a point. >
  
  As someone who works with KPIs, it’s astonishing that we don’t have success metrics defined for federal governments in a democracy.
  Granted….in the US we can’t even agree on the proper role of government, yet alone goals or metrics.  But, defining the role and goals would be a first step before even thinking about metrics. >
  
  How do you convince leadership that their chosen kpi's incentivize bad behavior? I feel like I rarely have luck >
  
  That's so incredibly broad.  I suppose there's the economic strength and independence of a nation, it's national defense, the health of its people, a society's cohesion, and of course the freedoms of its citizenry. >
  
  Economic strength, and society cohesion I would say has nothing to do with the efficacy of government. >
  
  There's a number of metrics that one could use for this.
  
  Electoral Democracy Index
  Stability of Democratic Institutions
  Median income/consumption per day
  Poverty rates against the international poverty line
  Burden of disease (estimates years of lost life from disease and disability, making it a decent measure of healthcare system effectiveness.)
  Life expectancy
  Child mortality rates
  Maternal mortality rates
  Overall crime (couldn't find a good chart for this one, so here's homicide rates)
  Global Hunger
  There's honestly a lot of ways to measure food security, especially with children, so here's a collection of graphs on that
  Electricity access
  Internet access
  Gender ownership rights
  Gender inequality index
  
  None of these are perfect, but in general they give a realistic picture of standards of living >
  
  The well being of the most disadvantaged, the lack of spending allowed in elections, the amount of regulation preventing corruption >
  
  Basically, when you step down is the place in a better state than when you received it?
  Of course some latitude has to be given to external events, but it still a pretty good rough yardstick. >
  
  
  when you step down is the place in a better state than when you received it?
  
  You'd think that people would be able to agree on such a criteria.