How Countries Provide for Their Citizens: America Ranks 31st

We endlessly hear politicians of both parties, but especially Republicans bloviating about "American exceptionalism" even as objective measures such as off the charts gun deaths, a declining life expectancy and other criteria suggest that to the extent America is exceptional it is often in a negative sense.  A new survey that looks at 170 countries across the globe and how well nations care for their citizens and reveals America in an embarrassing 31st position - not exactly exceptional - and has fallen steadily since 2016 revealing that Trump's and the GOP's "America first" mantra has been anything but a success.   Even more embarrassing is what countries place above the USA, such as South Korea, the Czech Republic and Slovenia to name a few.  Of course all of the advanced European nations - the "Old Europe" so maligned by the American political right - place above America where wealth disparity is soaring and the Republican Party's reverse Robin Hood agenda continues to push to marginalize the many so that the super wealthy can prosper even more. A piece in The Economist looks at the study and its findings.  Here are highlights:

HOW WELL off is humanity? Which countries’ citizens are thriving and which are languishing? Where are people making progress and where are they sliding back? Often the answers to such questions come from examining their economies. GDP per person, however, can only show so much. More important is how prosperity translates into well-being. A dataset published on May 24th by the Social Progress Imperative, a non-profit organisation, aims to show that. It ranks 170 countries on how well they have provided for their citizens, using metrics other than wealth.

[I]t tracks 52 indicators and groups them into three categories, to which it gives equal weight: basic human needs (such as food and water), the foundations for long-term development (education and health care) and “opportunity” (including personal rights and freedoms).

The results still suggest a link between wealth and well-being: the richest countries are often the ones where citizens thrive. Conditions are worst in the poorest. But the data also show that countries that have made great progress in some areas, such as meeting basic needs, let their citizens down in others, especially in protecting and expanding their freedoms.

The SPI’s findings for 2022 put Norway top, with a score of 90.7. South Sudan came last. In general wealthy European countries are among the highest-ranked whereas countries in sub-Saharan Africa are the lowest.

In a separate analysis, the SPI shows how scores have changed between 1990 and 2020 . . . After rapid progress in the 1980s and 1990s, improvements in human welfare seem to have slowed. Progress in some regions, such as Latin America, has stalled. The United States, meanwhile, is going backwards.

The region that experienced the greatest increase in well-being is East Asia and the Pacific. Taken together, countries there improved their SPI score by an average of 18 points between 1990 and 2020. Much of that was driven by the rise of China’s middle class, which showed up in higher scores on indicators for health education and provision of basic needs.

South Asia has also seen significant progress. India’s SPI score, for example, increased by 16 points over the three decades. But it is tiny Bhutan, sandwiched between India and China, that advanced the most among the 170 countries. Its score jumped by 30 points as it greatly increased its provisions for meeting basic human needs.

Paired with data on GDP, the SPI rankings show that economic growth is important, but not the sole determinant for social progress . . . . China’s GDP per person increased 11-fold between 1990 and 2010; over the same period its SPI score increased by 45%. India achieved a similar jump in its score, from a slightly lower base, with a third of China’s economic growth.

America is another country where economic success is accompanied by deterioration in other areas. Despite having the richest citizens in the G7, a club of rich democracies, its SPI score, of 87.6, is the lowest in that group. Since 2016 America’s SPI score has gone steadily downwards even though its economy has grown faster than those of other rich countries. That is largely because of worse scores in the “opportunity” category, which includes measures of discrimination and access to advanced education. Worryingly, America’s performance reflects a trend: progress on personal rights is stalling around the world. Money, it seems, is not the root of all good.