Two recent rankings encapsulate a broad range of public policy areas and show where the United States is ranked in key areas of policy and performance. The OECD has developed a “Better Life” index, using a variety of measurements: housing, income, community, education, jobs, civic engagement, health, life satisfaction, safety, and work-life balance. In this index, the United States ranked twenty-eighth.
The Social Progress Imperative, an organization founded by Professor Michael Porter, developed the Social Progress Index, which collects data from around the world. Rather than concentrating on wealth and GDP, the Social Progress Index looks at fifty measures, grouped around nutrition and basic medical care, water and sanitation, shelter, personal safety, access to basic knowledge, access to communications and information, health and wellness, environmental quality, personal rights, personal freedom and choice, inclusiveness, and access to advanced education. In 2011, the United States ranked eleventh; then it fell to twenty-eighth in 2020; two years later, the United States ranking had improved slightly, to twenty-sixth among industrialized countries.
Who does better? It is the usual suspects: Norway, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, and Iceland come in at the top. Ranking above the United States were every industrialized country in the OECD: Australia ranked twelfth; South Korea, seventeenth; United Kingdom, nineteenth; and France, twentieth.
Source: Social Progress Index, 2022, https://www.socialprogress.org/global-index-2022-results/.
Twenty-eighth and twenty-sixth. Surely the US federal and state governments can do better. Are we held back because Americans do not want to see improvements, or Americans simply do not know how uncompetitive we have become in the past several decades? Are we held back because a majority of policymakers believe that it is not the government’s responsibility to enact improvements? More than thirty years ago, sociologist Paul Starr, who came to prominence through his efforts for national health care during the 1990s, argued that “many Americans have become convinced that there simply are no public solutions to our national problems. Or if there are, that Congress could not possibly enact them in a rational and coherent form.” Thirty years later, Michael Porter concluded, “We’re no longer the country we think we are.”
Sources: Paul Starr, "Can Government Work?" The American Prospect (2) (Summer 1990);
Porter quoted in Nicholas Kristof, “We’re No. 28! And Dropping,” New York Times, September 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/opinion/united-states-social-progress.html. Porter, a professor at the Harvard University Business School, chaired the advisory panel for the Social Progress Index.
Looking at the members of the OECD, we find that Norway ranks Number 1, followed by Slovenia, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Iceland, and Finland. The United States ranks an embarrassingly low 28th.
Source: OECD Better Life Index, https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org.
