Opinion | ‘We’re No. 28! And Dropping!’

Authored by nytimes.com and submitted by speckz
image for Opinion | ‘We’re No. 28! And Dropping!’

Michael Green, the C.E.O. of the group that puts out the Social Progress Index, notes that the coronavirus will affect health, longevity and education, with the impact particularly large in both the United States and Brazil. The equity and inclusiveness measured by the index seem to help protect societies from the virus, he said.

“Societies that are inclusive, tolerant and better educated are better able to manage the pandemic,” Green said.

The decline of the United States over the last decade in this index — more than any country in the world — is a reminder that we Americans face structural problems that predate President Trump and that festered under leaders of both parties. Trump is a symptom of this larger malaise, and also a cause of its acceleration.

David G. Blanchflower, a Dartmouth economist, has new research showing that the share of Americans reporting in effect that every day is a bad mental health day has doubled over 25 years. “Rising distress and despair are largely American phenomenon not observed in other advanced countries,” Blanchflower told me.

This decline is deeply personal for me: As I’ve written, a quarter of the kids on my old No. 6 school bus in rural Oregon are now dead from drugs, alcohol and suicide — what are called “deaths of despair.” I lost one friend to a heroin overdose this spring and have had more friends incarcerated than I could possibly count; the problems are now self-replicating in the next generation because of the dysfunction in some homes.

You as taxpayers paid huge sums to imprison my old friends; the money would have been far better invested educating them, honing their job skills or treating their addictions.

That’s why this is an election like that of 1932. That was the year American voters decisively rejected Herbert Hoover’s passivity and gave Franklin Roosevelt an electoral mandate — including a flipped Senate — that laid the groundwork for the New Deal and the modern middle class. But first we need to acknowledge the reality that we are on the wrong track.

SrslyBadDad on September 10th, 2020 at 16:12 UTC »

“The Social Progress Index finds that Americans have health statistics similar to those of people in Chile, Jordan and Albania, while kids in the United States get an education roughly on par with what children get in Uzbekistan and Mongolia.”

These are aggregated results. So for every health outcome better than an Albanian health outcome, there is another one worse. Likewise for every US child getter an education better than a Mongolian child, there is one getting a worse education.

I mean no disrespect to those countries, just trying to highlight that the US with its wealth really should be doing better.

Also, I know that it’s not a one-for-one matchup but an index. Some kids are getting an amazing education in the US, there must be kids getting terrible outcomes.

2N9ne on September 10th, 2020 at 15:30 UTC »

There are unseen costs to everything we as a country do, let us not forget how expensive the War on Terror was

thealbinorhino504 on September 10th, 2020 at 15:09 UTC »

I'd be interested in seeing this broken out by State. The US sometimes feels like 7 or 8 different countries who all share the same flag, rather than one unified (or at least homogeneous) culture.