First, the MPI 2.0 doesn’t replace discrete indicators for those who love them. But it does give a quick overview

Sure, an indicator needs to be unpacked. And with infographics and animations it’s easy to make the MPI digestible.

In contrast, a dashboard of even 10 indicators is sort of hard to take in all in one gulp. So what happens is you ignore some, and focus on others. The MPI gives an explicit overview instead.

But there’s one more thing that in my view is really key:

A MDG dashboard misses something vital. No one – I mean, no one – knows who is deprived in several things at the same time – malnutrition, unsafe water, no schooling, few assets.

The MPI brings this into view. That’s how it improves on HDI (besides being a poverty indicator – HDI measures well-being and includes billionaires). And that’s how MPI informs policy – because when people’s disadvantages are inter-connected, they have to be addressed together too.

So I see your point, but I honestly think MPI will add firepower, not distract. At least, I hope so.

Say the MPI 2.0, or whatever you called it, went up, or down, in a given country. You’d need an extra layer of data analysis – always fatal as that’s the point you lose people’s attention – to know why. It could be that health outcomes got a lot better, but education outcomes got a bit worse, and so the overall MPI score went up a bit. This would neither be helpful for policy makers, nor tell you much about what people think is important, and it would all be much too complicated to generate any campaigning or political energy anyway.
The beauty of having eight discrete goals is that campaigning and advocacy groups can choose to focus on those which are the highest priority in their country, or where the government is doing the least. This is one of the ways that individual MDGs, at least, have had some traction on national governments, which as we all know is the key to actually making things happen. Hiding all the different parts in one indicator would make this much harder.

We already have an HDI and by all accounts some governments do pay attention to how they fare relative to others. I’m not sure there’s much point in having another composite index, which would do more or less the same thing. If it’s to be worth having at all, a post-2015 agreement should fill a gap in the global agreements we already have, not duplicate them.

Think tank,researchers and scientists have come up with good policies, facts and figures findings to guide governments and the people how they can help their citizens come out of poverty and how resources can be generated in a sustainable manner to help them deliver,many have ignored or turned deaf ear and then fight for their own ends.