In 1976, Harold Laswell and fellow political scientists Richard C. Snyder and Charles F. Hermann published a paper outlining their proposals for a global monitoring system that would ‘appraise the effects of government on human dignity’. Indebted to Deutsch’s and John Weltman’s pioneering development of cybernetic approaches to political science, Laswell and his collaborators aimed to design a ‘continuous, open, visible, and self-correcting’ cybernetic system through which governments could weight the effects of their policies in relation to universal standards and ‘steer’ accordingly. Embodying the cybernetic concept of feedback, the primary component of the proposed system would be a network of policy scientists who would ‘employ standardized procedures’ to collect information and continuously appraise the impact of government actions ‘on the attainment and distribution of basic human values’. In turn, the information collected by the monitors was to be periodically provided to governments who would themselves use it to evaluate and potentially shift public policy to better advance basic public goods.

Interestingly, Laswell et al. deployed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) to fill in their definition of human dignity. Echoing the informational conception of law propounded by cyberneticists such as Turchin and Wiener, the UDHR was assumed to represent a transparent and clear consensus about human values that, in theory at least, all government action could be measured against. Taking the full gamut of rights enshrined in the Declaration, the monitoring system’s vision of human dignity not only included issues of democratic participation and other civil and political rights but placed a particular emphasis on social and economic rights, especially in relation to issues such as education and health.

But the question remained of how social and economic rights might be operationalised as measures of human dignity. For Laswell and his co-authors, the answer lay in another field greatly influenced by cybernetics and systems theory: social indicators.