Enjoying the Low Life?

APRIL 9, 2015

Nicholas Kristof

The United States is the most powerful colossus in the history of the world: Our

nuclear warheads could wipe out the globe, our enemies tweet on iPhones, and kids

worldwide bop to Beyoncé.

Yet let’s get real. All this hasn’t benefited all Americans. A newly released global

index finds that America falls short, along with other powerful countries, on what

matters most: assuring a high quality of life for ordinary citizens.

The Social Progress Index for 2015 ranks the United States 16th in the world.

We may thump our chests and boast that we’re No. 1, and in some ways we are. But,

in important ways, we lag.

The index ranks the United States 30th in life expectancy, 38th in saving

children’s lives, and a humiliating 55th in women surviving childbirth. O.K., we

know that we have a high homicide rate, but we’re at risk in other ways as well. We

have higher traffic fatality rates than 37 other countries, and higher suicide rates

than 80.

We also rank 32nd in preventing early marriage, 38th in the equality of our

education system, 49th in high school enrollment rates and 87th in cellphone use.

Ouch. “We’re No. 87!” doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?

Michael E. Porter, the Harvard Business School professor who helped devise the

Social Progress Index, says that it’s important to have conventional economic

measures such as G.D.P. growth. But social progress is also a critical measure, he

notes, of how a country is serving its people.

“We’re not now No. 1 in a lot of stuff that traditionally we have been,” said

Professor Porter, an expert on international competitiveness. “What we’re learning is

that the fact that we’re not No. 1 on this stuff also means that we’re facing long-term

economic stresses.”

“We’re starting to understand that we can’t put economic development and

social progress in two separate buckets,” Porter added. “There’s a dialectic here.”

The top countries in the 2015 Social Progress Index are Norway, Sweden,

Switzerland, Iceland, New Zealand and Canada. Of the 133 countries rated, Central

African Republic is last, just after Chad and Afghanistan.

Sri Lanka does better than India. Bangladesh outperforms Pakistan. Both the

Philippines and South Africa do better than Russia. Mongolia comes in ahead of

China. And Canada wallops the United States.

One way of looking at the index is to learn from countries that outperform by

having social indicators better than their income levels. By that standard, the biggest

stars are Costa Rica and Uruguay, with New Zealand and Rwanda also

outperforming.

“This takes time,” said Michael Green, executive director of the Social Progress

Imperative, which produces the index. “Costa Rica is an overperformer because of its

history.”

Green notes that Costa Rica offered free, universal primary education in the

19th century. In the 20th century, it disbanded its military forces and invested some

of the savings in education. One payoff: Some surveys have found Costa Ricans

among the happiest people in the world.

Then there are the underperformers that do worse than would be expected from

their income level. Saudi Arabia leads that list.

The Social Progress Index, now in its second year, might seem a clarion call for

greater equality, but that’s not quite right. Professor Porter and his number crunchers

found only a mild correlation between economic equality (measured by

Gini coefficient) and social progress. What mattered much more was poverty.

Of course, wealthy countries with high poverty tend to be unequal as well. But

inequality at the top seems to matter less for well-being than inequality at the

bottom. Perhaps we should worry less about reining in the top 1 percent and more

about helping the bottom 20 percent?

On the other hand, one way to finance empowerment programs is to raise taxes

on tycoons. And when there is tremendous inequality, the wealthy create private

alternatives to public goods — private schools, private security forces, gated

communities — that lead to disinvestment in public goods vital to the needy.

In any case, the 2015 Social Progress Index should be serve notice to Americans

— and to people around the globe. We obsess on the wrong measures, so we often

have the wrong priorities.

As an American, what saddens me is also that our political system seems unable

to rise to the challenges.

As Porter notes, Americans generally understand that we face economic

impediments such as declining infrastructure, yet we’re frozen. We appreciate that

our education system is a mess, yet we’re passive.

We can send people to space and turn watches into computers, but we seem

incapable of consensus on the issues that matter most to our children — so our

political system remains in gridlock, even as other countries pass us by.

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