A USA Cheer for the 21st Century: ‘We’re Number 12!’

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



A USA Cheer for the 21st Century: ‘We’re Number 12!’
November 9, 2010 ⋅

How much does inequality cost us? The United States holds far more wealth than any other nation in the world. Yet average people in 11 other countries, says landmark new UN research, are enjoying a higher standard of living than Americans.

By Sam Pizzigati


Twenty years ago, in 1990, the United Nations began publishing an annual Human Development Report. The economists behind this new initiative — India’s Nobel Prize-winning Amaryta Sen among them — clearly saw themselves as scholarly subversives. They were openly challenging economic orthodoxy and that orthodoxy’s ultimate yardstick and holy grail, the “Gross National Product.”

To register social progress, economic orthodoxy held back then, nations needed to simply hike their “GNP,” their sum total of economic goods and services.

Inequality Human Development IndexBut real human development, Sen and his colleagues countered, involves much more than economic growth. Real progress, their first Human Development Report in 1990 emphasized, encompasses “the freedom to be healthy, to be educated, and to enjoy a decent standard of living.”



GNP cannot measure this real human development. The inaugural Human Development Report offered a statistical yardstick that could: a Human Development Index, a measure that tracked not just economic growth, but health and education — as expressed in life expectancy and literacy — as well.

The UN has been releasing an annual “Human Development Index” ever since, grading almost every nation in the world by a single number that reflects people’s capacity to live life to the fullest. And this Index, the HDI, has had an impact. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/a-usa-cheer-for-the-21st-century-were-number-12/