Current EPS output metrics include emissions of various pollutants, financial well-being for various parts of society, public health damages, and various ways of describing the energy system (such as numbers of different types of power plants or vehicles). Consider whether there are other human welfare metrics (aside from how "labor and consumers" are doing financially, or how many public health incidents are avoided).
One example would be time saved (or non-monetary value-of-time). For instance, owning a car requires a certain number of hours per year in maintenance, registering the car with the DMV, smog testing, refueling, and the like. Switching to walking or biking might reduce these time costs, but might introduce other time costs for slower means of travel. Not all time might be equal - time spent biking might be of higher value than time spent waiting at the DMV. A way to assign value to time spent on different things might be necessary to make the time saved metric meaningful.
An easier possibility is to find an established, accepted index for measuring holistic human welfare in the literature and calculate this as an EPS output metric. Some examples that come to mind are the UN's Human Development Index (HDI), the OECD's Better Life Index, and Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index.
Current EPS output metrics include emissions of various pollutants, financial well-being for various parts of society, public health damages, and various ways of describing the energy system (such as numbers of different types of power plants or vehicles). Consider whether there are other human welfare metrics (aside from how "labor and consumers" are doing financially, or how many public health incidents are avoided).
One example would be time saved (or non-monetary value-of-time). For instance, owning a car requires a certain number of hours per year in maintenance, registering the car with the DMV, smog testing, refueling, and the like. Switching to walking or biking might reduce these time costs, but might introduce other time costs for slower means of travel. Not all time might be equal - time spent biking might be of higher value than time spent waiting at the DMV. A way to assign value to time spent on different things might be necessary to make the time saved metric meaningful.
An easier possibility is to find an established, accepted index for measuring holistic human welfare in the literature and calculate this as an EPS output metric. Some examples that come to mind are the UN's Human Development Index (HDI), the OECD's Better Life Index, and Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index.
Suggested by Skip Laitner on 7/14/2020