Policy: Development goals should enable decision-making.

The authors discuss the scheduled adoption of the initiative known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the organization the United Nations (UN) in September 2015 and argue that the SDG monitoring apparatus must assist nations in implementing development strategies and resource allocation. The authors reject the concept of target-setting and argue in favor of using measures of investment return, integrating expert knowledge, and building in uncertainty in predictive models. They also support the use of decision analysis models such as Monte Carlo simulations or Bayesian models.