I think a lot of us have the sense that the United States has been slipping a bit compared to other industrialized countries. And it's not because we aren't wealthy - it's because many of our public services, especially health care and education, don't reach all of our citizens. More than any other wealthy country, we seem willing to leave our fellow citizens behind. This has led me to wonder: are we, in fact, a fully developed country? For all our wealth, where do we stand on the world stage when general well-being is taken into account?
It's a seemingly abstract and subjective question, but there's actually an objective statistical measure we can can use to try to sort it out: the human development index.
The HDI combines measures of various social indicators, including life expectancy, literacy, education, and per capita GDP, to measure overall human development, which "refers to the process of widening the options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education, health care, income, employment, etc." By this measure, the United States ranks rather high - 15th out of all countries, with an HDI of .950, according to this table, which is based on 2006 data. But the HDI of individual states varies quite a bit. In this diary I'm going to look at the patterns of human development in the US in the context of international standards of development; in a later diary I'll look at some of the weird political consequences of these patterns.
Here is a map from Wikipedia of states by their human development index score:
This map is based on numbers from The Measure of America. It gives a good sense of regional patterns of human development in the US and the comparative relationship of states to each other. But the numbers in the abstract don't tell us much; to see what these numbers mean, we need to compare them to other countries. And when we do that, it's easy to see that the HDI of many states are comparable to some of the most developed countries in the world; but that other states have HDI scores well outside the range of the developed economies of Europe and Asia.
So here is a long list. These are the 76 top countries ranked by human development index score, with the 50 states interposed so you can see their level of development relative to countries around the world:
- Iceland - .968
- Norway - .968
- Canada - .967
- Australia - .965
- Ireland - .962
Connecticut - .962
Massachusetts - .961
New Jersey - .961
District of Columbia - .960
Maryland - .960
Hawaii - .959
New York - .959
- Netherlands - .958
- Sweden - .958
New Hampshire - .958
Minnesota - .958
Rhode Island - .958
California - .958
Colorado - .958
Virginia - .957
Illinois - .957
- Japan - .956
- Luxembourg - .956
- Switzerland - .955
- France - .955
Vermont - .955
Washington - .955
Alaska - .955
- Finland - .954
Delaware - .953
- Denmark - .952
Wisconsin - .952
- Austria - .951
Michigan - .951
- United States - .950
Iowa - .950
Pennsylvania - .950
- Spain - .949
- Belgium - .948
- Greece - .947
Nebraska - .946
- Italy - .945
- New Zealand - .944
- United Kingdom - .942
- Hong Kong - .942
Kansas - .941
- Germany - .940
Arizona - .939
North Dakota - .936
Oregon - .935
Maine - .932
Utah - .932
Ohio - .932
- Israel - .930
Georgia - .928
Indiana - .928
- South Korea - .927
North Carolina - .925
- Slovenia - .923
- Brunei - .919
- Singapore - .918
Texas - .914
- Kuwait - .912
- Cyprus - .912
Missouri - .912
Nevada - .911
- United Arab Emirates - .903
- Bahrain - .902
South Dakota - .902
- Portugal - .900
- Qatar - .899
Florida - .898
- Czech Republic - .897
Wyoming - .897
New Mexico - .895
- Malta - .894
Idaho - .890
- Barbados - .889
Montana - .885
- Hungary - .877
- Poland - .875
- Chile - .874
- Slovakia - .872
- Estonia - .871
South Carolina - .871
- Lithuania - .869
- Latvia - .863
- Croatia - .862
- Argentina - .860
- Uruguay - .859
- Cuba - .855
- Bahamas - .854
- Costa Rica - .847
- Mexico - .842
- Libya - .840
- Oman - .839
- Seychelles - .836
- Saudi Arabia - .835
- Bulgaria - .834
- Trinidad and Tobago - .833
- Panama - .832
- Antigua and Barbuda - .830
- Saint Kitts and Nevis - .830
- Venezuela - .826
- Romania - .825
- Malaysia - .823
- Montenegro - .822
- Serbia - .821
- Saint Lucia - .821
Kentucky - .820
- Belarus - .817
Tennessee - .816
Oklahoma - .815
Alabama - .809
- Macedonia - .808
- Albania - .807
- Brazil - .807
- Kazakhstan - .807
- Ecuador - .807
- Russia - .806
Arkansas - .803
- Mauritius - .802
- Bosnia and Herzegovina - .802
Louisiana - .801
West Virginia - .800
Mississippi - .799
- Turkey - .798
As you can see, there's a number of states, mostly in the Northeast but some in the Midwest and West, that are as highly developed as just about anywhere in the world. Other states are more similar to the Asian Tiger countries or the more marginal areas of Western Europe. Still others are most comparable to some of the emerging economies of Eastern Europe or the Petrostates of the Middle East.
And then there is a group of Southern States that is a good jag farther down the list. These eight states - Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Mississippi - form a core region where human development index scores are well below the HDIs of any other country that would clearly be considered "highly developed." These states all have an HDI between .799 and .820 - more than 50 points lower than the next lowest state, South Carolina. This underdeveloped core constitutes a significant outlier from the level of development of the United States as a whole, and this is clearly obvious in the country comparisons. Among the nations that have a higher HDI than each of these states are Cuba, Mexico, Libya, Bulgaria, Panama, Malaysia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Four of these states rank below Albania, which has a per capita GDP of $6,000. In terms of human development, this clutch of states in the Upland and Deep South is well outside of the mainstream of developed economies.
In a later diary, I'll talk about the interesting and sort of unaccountable political trends in the undeveloped core.
This was originally posted at The Map Scroll, by the way.