The world economies in a cube

If we want to measure progress towards a more sustainable state of our societies we need to move from the typical habit of just using GDP as the only important indicator for policy. The typical representations of sustainability focus on three aspects: environment, society and economy. These are not three equivalent components (as it could be understood from Figure 1), since they have very different characteristics: while the economic system changes rapidly and something economically unfavorable can become feasible changing taxes or incentives, the social system is much slower in changes and for the environment there is nothing we can do to make favorable something that is harmful.