Americans like to boast, “We’re No. 1,” and in some arenas — notably military power that claim holds. But when it comes to the well-being of ordinary citizens, the evidence tells a far less flattering story.
A new study released on Wednesday, based on the Social Progress Index, ranks the US 32nd out of 171 countries in overall quality of life, behind nations such as Poland, Lithuania, and Cyprus.
Even more troubling, the US ranking has fallen steadily over time under presidents of both parties — and now appears poised to drop further due to cuts in healthcare and other services under President Trump.
The Social Progress Index, introduced in the 2010s by a team of scholars and policy experts, measures 12 components of social well-being, from safety and health to education and opportunity.
In 2011, the US ranked 18th not impressive, but still ahead of countries like France, Italy and Spain. Today, all three outrank America.
Since 2011, the US has declined in every single component of the index, said Michael Green, the chief executive of the organisation that publishes it.
“The quality of life in America is not just worse than in a handful of Scandinavian countries,” Green said, “but worse than in all of America’s G7 competitors.” The US now trails former Communist nations like Slovenia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as newer democracies such as South Korea.
“The US won the Cold War by being both an economic superpower and a social progress superpower,” Green added. “Over the last 30 years, America has simply let go.”
No index is definitive, and reasonable people can quibble with specific metrics.
But the Social Progress Index usefully applies objective data to compare how countries translate wealth into lived experience. Its findings are sobering:
— In safety, the US ranks 99th, behind Pakistan and Nicaragua.
— In K-12 education, it ranks 47th, behind Vietnam and Kazakhstan.
— In health, it comes in 45th, behind Argentina and Panama.
Other assessments point in the same direction. The World Happiness Report places the US at 24th, down from 15th a decade ago.
The Atlantic Council’s freedom index ranks America 22nd and declining. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index puts the country at 28th.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with its promise of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In a sense, these indexes measure how well the nation is living up to its own ideals.
The US excels at generating economic growth, but it performs poorly at converting that growth into the things people care most about. Consider Latvia: It has less than half the per capita GDP of the US, yet posts similar scores on the Social Progress Index.
There are caveats. The US may be more transparent than some countries in collecting data, particularly in areas like infant mortality.
Europe’s social model, for all its strengths, may suppress innovation and long-term growth.
Still, the index captures something real — a decline that helps explain the anger and disillusionment fueling populist movements on both the right and the left.
When Americans say the system is not working for them, these rankings help explain why.
The situation may soon worsen. Trump’s proposed health care cuts, I have written, could cost an estimated 51,000 lives annually, while leaving tens of thousands of addiction, diabetes and mental-health cases untreated.
Liberals may be tempted to see this as a Trump-era problem. But the deeper reality is bipartisan and decades long. Since roughly 1970, the United States has lagged peer nations on key quality-of-life measures.
“This isn’t about Trump,” Green said.
“Obama and Biden didn’t reverse the decline. Neither did the Bushes or Clinton. It’s a long, slow, multipresident car crash.”
Rising stock prices and GDP growth, he argued, anesthetized voters until stagnant living standards became impossible to ignore — helping pave the way for Trump’s rise.
“We should think of Trump as a consequence, not the cause, of America’s social decline,” Green said.
So what’s the answer? Part of it lies in sustained investment in human capital: children, education and skills.
That means early childhood programs, vocational training, drug treatment, community colleges and policies that translate economic growth into broad-based opportunity.
America’s steady slide should sound an alarm. We are not the country we imagine ourselves to be. Unless we confront that reality, our familiar boast may quietly evolve into something closer to the truth: “We’re No. 32.”
The New York Times