| Number 86 | September 15, 2000 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Every week I have a dilemma about this editor's note. For example, this week I ran out of space in the paper version of the Notes, so the entire editor's note was about 9 words. Ridiculous. As long-time readers know, Nygaard Notes used to be much more "improvisational" in length. Some weeks it would come in at 2,000 words, some weeks twice that. Now that there is a paper version, every issue is more or less the same. I'm not sure if this is an improvement or not. Some people have asked me to make it longer. Some have asked me to please keep it short. For now, the length is more or less set, since I want to keep the paper copy to four pages. There continues to be a backlog of things that either a) I want to talk about, or b) people want me to talk about. The point of this note is to say that I very much appreciate all of the suggestions that readers have sent in lately (more than usual!) as to things that should appear in the Notes. If you have not seen your ideas crop up in the pages of the Notes yet is not due to a lack of interest, but mostly a lack of time and space. Also, many of the ideas you see in Nygaard Notes have a relatively long gestation time. That is, I try not to publish things until I've had time to think about them for a while. So, your ideas may yet crop up, but not until they have been discussed with friends, pondered late into the night, and checked against other sources. Does this sound scientific? It's not, but there is some rhyme and reason to the choices that go into each week's edition of Nygaard Notes. And, whether you see immediate or direct evidence of it or not, your ideas very much influence what you see here. Please keep the ideas coming. In solidarity, Nygaard |
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There are several separate privately-funded attempts underway to report on the national well-being, some of which I will mention here. As useful as they are, they all suffer from the lack of a national commitment to such a project. Following the brief summaries below, I suggest what such a commitment might look like. The International Index of Social Progress comes out every few years, and "consists of 45 social indicators that have been subdivided into 10 sub-indexes, such as Education, Women's Status, and Political Participation. The IISP is comprehensive, international, comparative, and historical. However, it is also quite complicated and hard to find, and the international comparative method it uses is sort of oddly designed. See for yourself at: www.globalideasbank.org/BOV/BV-377.html. The Genuine Progress Indicator adjusts the Gross Domestic Product (which is the commonly-accepted measure of the size of our economy) to add in things that the GDP doesn't count, like housework, and subtracts the negative things that normally appear as positives, like spending on pollution cleanup. The GPI is easy to use, publishes very promptly, and has a "green" focus that seems to be missing in most other general indexes. But it is not international, and it suffers from the urge, common among conventional economists, to attach dollar values that are best measured in other ways (if they need to be "measured" at all). Learn more about the GPI at: www.rprogress.org/pubs/gpi1999/gpi1999.html. Perhaps the most well-known of the indexes is the Human Development Index which the United Nations Development Programme began publishing in 1990 as part of its annual Human Development Report. Broadly speaking, it looks at purchasing power, education, and health, and it assigns a number and a rank to each of the world's countries. I think the Human Development Index has a rather narrow focus. As I point out elsewhere in this issue, the United States ranks anywhere from 13th to 21st in most of the major quality of life categories, yet the UNHDI ranks the U.S. 3rd among nations of the world. That doesn't seem right to me. Read the 2000 report at: www.undp.org/hdr2000/english/HDR2000.html. The index that I have found most useful is the Index of Social Health. I explain why elsewhere in this issue. A National Commitment What we lack at the present time is a national commitment to pay attention to the social health of the nation. What might such a commitment look like? It would begin with the federal government, and might include the collection, organization, and publication of social data that is currently either unavailable or struggles to see the light of day. This might include a social survey such as the Swedish one I described last week. The President might create a "Council of Social Advisors" mandated to produce an "Index of Leading Social Indicators," develop thresholds for social performance, and generally stimulate discussion and foster broad public understanding of the state of the nation's social health. The major media should be encouraged to develop regular segments devoted to social reporting. And the public schools should include courses geared toward promoting public understanding of the concepts and ideas involved in social health. A Warning While the efforts of feminist and "green" economists to include the monetary value of such previously-ignored things as domestic work and forests in their accounting is perhaps better than ignoring them altogether, I think it is a very dangerous course to follow. When we attempt to put all of the human and natural world into the market, where it can be measured in terms of dollars, I think we all lose. The fundamental job of capitalism is to make everything into something that can be bought and sold. The unfortunately-lengthy word for this is "commodification." When we assign a dollar value to such things as the care of our children, or the air we breathe, we have already conceded that these things can be commodified. But what is the worth of a human life? Or a tree? How about clean drinking water? Or a butterfly? If we want to accept that the size of our Gross Domestic Product is the only measurement of our well-being, then we darned well better figure out how much it costs to take care of ourselves and our environment and factor those costs into the GDP. But I think it would be far better to work to put the GDP in its place. Let's allow economics to measure what it measures, which is what is in the market, and then we can start producing, reporting, discussing, and using entirely different measurements in our ongoing efforts to answer the question: "How are we doing?" And our measuring tool should not be the Almighty Dollar. |
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For the past couple of weeks I have been making the argument that the United States should produce a National Social Report. Although we do not have such a thing at present, there are a number of non-governmental groups that do publish indexes of social welfare which can be used to assess how the United States is doing in the "non-economic" realm. I explain each of them elsewhere in this issue of the Notes, and draw on them below, but in this section my primary source is data produced by the Institute for Innovation in Social Policy, at Fordham University. They have published their "Index of Social Health" since 1987, and I have in front of me their 1999 book entitled "The Social Health of the Nation." It, like all the indexes I have seen, has shortcomings – the major one being that it does not directly include environmental factors – but I will use it because it is the easiest to understand among the major indexes, it includes the best historical data for the United States, and it has the most comprehensive international comparative data of the bunch. So, How ARE We Doing? One way to judge the social health of a nation is to look at performance over time. In other words, are we doing better or worse than we used to? The United States is doing worse than we used to. The 1999 Index of Social Health (ISH) gives the United States a score of 46 out of a possible 100 for the year 1997, the most recent for which full figures are available. The high point was in 1973, when the U.S. Index stood at 76.9. By this measure, our social performance declined from 1973 to 1997 by 40 percent. This stands in marked contrast to the nation's economic performance between 1970 and 1998, during which time the nation's per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) INcreased by 169 percent. Despite the fact that it measures different things, the Genuine Progress Indicator paints a similar picture. 1970's GPI stood at $8,686, while the 1998 score was $6,549, a decline of 25 percent. From the 1950s until the early 1970s, the nation's economy and its social health tended to grow together. Since then, they have traveled in opposite directions. This trend is worth noting. Another way to judge social performance is to compare countries with similar levels of resources (wealth) with one another. The United States fares poorly here, also. The International Index of Social Progress places Denmark, Norway, and Austria at the top of the world rankings, with the United States coming in at number 27. It's worth noting that this index ranks several relatively small and "weak" economies, such as Poland, Italy, Bulgaria, and the Slovak Republic, ahead of the United States. The United Nations Human Development Index ranks the United States number 3, behind Canada and Norway. This reflects the limited criteria this index uses. I think a more accurate sense of the U.S. place in the community of nations can be found in the international Poverty Index, also calculated by the UN, in which the U.S. ranks 18th, essentially last place among wealthy countries. The Scandinavian countries lead the world using this index. The UN also publishes something called the "Gender Empowerment Measure," which "measures gender inequality in key areas of economic and political participation and decision-making." Here our country ranks 13th. Again the Scandinavian countries lead the way, but this time the U.S. comes in slightly ahead of the UK and ‘way ahead of Japan. To summarize, the United States has fallen far behind its last best performance, in 1973, and lags behind most other wealthy countries (and some not-so-wealthy ones) when it comes to providing for the basic social and material needs of its population. Breaking Down Our Social Performance The Index of Social Health looks at 16 different social indicators and crunches them into one overall number since, as they put it, "The quality of life in American society is shaped not by any one social problem, but by the combined effect of all of them acting on each other. For this reason, the focus of the Index is not primarily on separate problems, but on the way in which they interact to create a social climate." Nevertheless, it will deepen our understanding to look at the 16 indicators individually over the past 25 years. The latest figures are from the mid-to-late 1990s, and some of them appear to have improved since then. For example, violent crime rates have been declining for most of the 1990s (although they still are far above what they were in 1970). But the improvements do not appear to be sufficient to alter the general downward trend. In four categories the United States has improved consistently: Infant mortality, number of high school dropouts, poverty among the elderly, and life expectancy. However, even as we have improved our own performance, in each category the U.S. trails most other industrial nations. Here are the U.S. rankings in these categories (world leaders in parentheses):
These measures are quite crude, as we see wide variations within the U.S. when we break them down by region, race, gender, class, and so forth. For example, life expectancy at birth in the United States averages 76.1 years, but for black males that number is 66.1 years. On or near the Dakota Indian reservations in South Dakota it's only 61 years. In seven categories of social performance, the United States has simply gotten worse over the past 25 years. Between 1970 and 1996 the United States has seen dramatic increases in child abuse, child poverty, teen suicide, economic inequality, violent crime, and the number of people without health insurance. Average weekly wages have fallen by 19 percent over the period. That's bad enough, but the picture isn't complete until we look at other wealthy countries. Again, here are our rankings followed by the country in first place (length of list varies from indicator to indicator):
In four categories, there has been uneven performance over the years. Teenage drug use fell during the 1980s, and has gotten worse during the 1990s. ("Use" is not abuse, so I don't know what to make of this in any case.) Teenage birth rates went down a lot during the 1970s and stayed down until 1986, then they went up for five years, now they're going down. Go figure; they remain high by international standards. Alcohol-related traffic fatalities are fewer now than in 1970, although the rate has gone up and down in the meantime. Home ownership is less affordable now than it was in 1970, but much better than it was in the 1980s. For renters, the situation is a disaster compared to 1970. And we don't even have official figures for homelessness (what does that tell you about our priorities?) but it's not a good situation. The unemployment level in the U.S. has been up and down, but is currently the best of any of the wealthy nations. This good news is tempered by the falling wages mentioned above. International comparisons are unavailable for teenage drug use, alcohol-related traffic deaths, and affordable housing. |