The Global Consciousness Indicator (GCI) is a barometer of consciousness which measures the well-being of the citizens of a nation. The GCI is based on the Barrett Seven Levels of Consciousness model®. The Seven Levels Model is based on an expanded version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

There are many types of global indicators for measuring and comparing nations: each indicator looks at what is happening through a single lens. Each lens represents one aspect of a level of consciousness. For example, the Health Index focuses on an aspect of the survival level of consciousness; the Peace Index focuses on and aspect of the relationship level  of consciousness; the Education Index focuses on an  aspect of the self-esteem level of consciousness; the Democracy Index and the Gender Gap focus on two aspects of the transformation level of consciousness. Despite the large number of global indicators that are available, there is nothing that covers the whole; there is no indicator that measure the overall well-being of a nation. The GCI is an attempt to rectify this situation.

The GCI was constructed by allocating two, three or four of the global indicators, such as those mentioned above, to each of the seven levels of consciousness – seventeen indicators were used in all. The indicators used are all well tried and tested.[1]

Figure: The construction of the GCI for a nation

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The scores for the seventeen global indicators were normalized, and the normalized scores for the indicators at each level of consciousness were averaged to obtain a score for each level of consciousness (out of 100). The average scores for the seven levels of consciousness were added together to obtain an overall GCI score (out of 700) for the nation. The GCI scores in 2018 range from 659 for Norway to 77 for Afghanistan.

The GCI model does not provide a perfect measure for every level of consciousness: some levels are better represented than others. Also, some of the seventeen indicators used cover similar topics which may result in an element of double counting. Overall, the GCI is a reasonably good representation of the seven levels of consciousness model. The big advantage of the GCI is that it provides a single score which represents the level of well-being experienced by the citizens of a nation.

The focus of each level of consciousness and the number and types of indicators used at each level of consciousness are shown below.

Table: The number and types of indicators at each level of consciousness.