Measuring the Quality of Life in the U.S.: Political Reflections

Reports have a special place in the canon of social commentary. There is Lord Bryce s American Commonwealth (1888), Gunnar Myrdals American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), Werner Sombart s Why Is There No Socialism in the United Statesi (1906) and, of course the standard setter Alexis de Tocquevilles Democracy in America in 1835. What makes these works touchstones is not just the quality of the analysis or the fame of their authors but the privileged status they have come to enjoy as works of external reflection and criticism. For a people prone to ignore the rest of the world or see abroad only a mirror image of themselves, Americans have always had a surprisingly soft spot for the foreign observer willing to discourse on what makes their nation unique. Now comes The Measure of America: The American Human Development Report, 2008-200% billed as "the first-ever human development rankings for U.S. states, congressional districts, and ethnic groups." The authors Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, and Eduardo Borges Martins are all Americans. Their headquarters is in New York, not Paris or London. And yet they come to their task with a mission from abroad and with a bit of the missionary spirit as well. The grounding for their effort comes from the United Nations Human Development Index, based on the pioneering work of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. The Human Development Index provides a measure of social well-being distinct from the most commonly used measure in cross-national rankings, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. By combining national statistics on life expectancy, literacy, school enrollment, and, yes, GDP per head, it is meant to capture the broad quality of life for a nations citizens. The American Human Development Index is a variation on the standard UN measure, constructed by the authors to permit finer-grained analysis of affluent nations. (It looks at college completion, for example, rather than literacy.) The basic purpose, however, is the same: to provide an alternative to average economic output as a barometer of the health of society. And by looking at the United States through the prism of an index used to examine and compare nations across the globe, The Measure of America (that is, the Report) becomes a powerful, if incomplete, outsiders' critique of a nation that has lost its focus, of a political elite that has allowed increasingly hollow claims about unbridled economic gains to serve as an excuse for failing to address fundamental social problems. The Report is not an elegant piece of writing. It is a slickly designed pamphlet whose prose is the tough sinew that connects charts and call-out boxes. Its graphics look more comfortable on the Web than behind its bright orange cover (the Website for the project credits an "internationally recognized Visual SenseMaking firm," and the SenseMakers certainly earned their keep). If Toqueville had had bar charts, he might never have coined those beautiful phrases. But the graphics deserve respect on their own terms, and they tell a fascinating, if dispiriting, story. For all its wealth and power, the United States is a mediocre human developer an unimpressive position it has only recently come to occupy. In 1980, we were behind only Switzerland on the UN s standard Human Development Index. Five years later, we were still second, though to our northern neighbor Canada rather than to the Swiss, a position we held in 1990, too. But then our ranking plummeted: from second in 1990 to sixth in 1995 to ninth in 2000 to twelfth in 2005. Still the top-ranked country besides little Luxembourg in GDP per capita, the United States now must content itself with the cheer "We're Number Twelve" in human development. Yet the cross-national rankings are only a tiny part of The Measure of America. The main show is the extensive analysis of human development across U.S. states and Jacob Hacker is Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science and a Resident Fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University.