and no, this is not on an international rating of education - that's a subject for a forthcoming diary.
No, it is on Vision of Humanity's Global Peace Index, about which you can read here.
In case you are wondering, New Zealand is #1, followed in order by Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Austria, Sweden and Japan. Perhaps those don't shock you.
But consider these rankings, significantly above ours:
#9 Slovenia, tied for #16 Qatar, #34 Botswana, #39 Vietnam (!), #45 Laos, tied for #54 Egypt, and #68 Cuba (!!).
You can read the entire 3rd annual list here
Perhaps we need to explore a bit?
The rating of the US puts us in the medium range as to our state of peace, as you can see on this map. As you can see, that puts us on a part with the rest of our hemisphere, where Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay rate Very High, and a few nations rate lower, with Colombia, Venezuela and Haiti being VERY LOW. Most of the nations rated highly are industrialized democracies, in W. Europe, Australasia, and a few elsewhere like Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It is perhaps not surprising to see large chunks of Africa, and places like Iraq and Afghanistan rated as having a VERY LOW index, a status also awarded Turkey, Lebanon, Russia, India and Pakistan, among others.
Each nation is rated on a scale of from 1 (most peaceful) to 5 on a series of drivers. You can see how a nation is rated by clicking on its name on the list.
On the main list of drivers,we don't do too bad on internal and external conflicts being fought, perhaps surprisingly receiving a rating of 1.5, although our death toll in external conflicts earns us a middling 3.
So perhaps we should look at those drivers that are 3 or higher.
At 3, besides the aforementioned conflict deaths, we find
Respect for human rights
Potential for terrorist acts
Ease of access to weapons of minor destruction.
We have no 4 ratings on the basic list, but we rate at the bottom, 5, on the following:
Number of jailed per 100,000 of population (not surprising, given we have the highest rate of any democracy, and perhaps in the world)
Military capability/sophistication (also no surprise, given the worlds most expensive military by far)
I should note one other rating, which is the importance of religion in national life, where our rating of 3 puts us in the Middle range.
You can click on the various drivers to see what they are, and what they mean. That includes those on other than the basic list. Thus, on Gini-coefficient, which measures the extent to which the distribution of income among individuals or households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution, we have a rating of 40.8; and we have an infant mortality rate of 6.5/1,000 live births. On the Gini Index, according to the CIA and the UN, we do not do well on income inequality. And one can be a fairly wealthy nation and do better, for example, Gini ratings on Wiki's list of CIA ratings) put Sweden at 23; Denmark and Slovenia at 24; and a batch of countries ranging from poor Albania to wealthy Germany and France at 28, as compared to the US at 45 (the 40.8 in the index is from the UN rating, which is not available for all nations - Iceland has no UN rating, for example).
Let's do a bit of a comparison
Nation rank Gini infant mortality
US 83 40.8 6.5
New Zealand 1 36.2 5.2
Costa Rica 29 49.8 10.7
Denmark 2 24.7 4
Cuba 68 30.0 5
Canada 8 32.6 4.9
You can play with the charts and see other interesting factors.
Now for some commentary from your fearless diarist.
Were one to include access to health care - which is not part of the rating, we would clearly do much worse.
Even if we back out the factors such as our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and the concomitant deaths, we still have problems. Both the Gini and the infant mortality rates are an indication of things that are far from right in this nation.
Let's deal with infant mortality. For a nation in which some claim we have the world's best health care system (we don't) and which can legitimately claim the availability (to those who can afford it) of the world's best medical treatment our rate of infant mortality is an embarrassment. It represents an abandonment of those with no ability to care for themselves, those just born. If our medical system cannot address this most basic of needs, there is something fundamentally wrong.
To explore this a bit more. Wiki offers two lists by rank, from the UN and the CIA. On the UN rating we are 33rd, behind such nations as Cuba, Brunei, the Czech Republic, and in range with New Caledonia and Croatia. Our own CIA rates us worse, at 46, well behind tiny Bermuda, with a rate only a bit more than 1/3 of ours, and behind basically all of Western Europe, and even higher than in Guam!
I sometimes wonder how many Americans realize how poorly we do in many international comparisons. As far as the impact upon educational comparisons, we can explain a great deal of it by the Gini index - our economic inequality explains many of our failures, and is not just limited to education. It applies as well to access to medical care.
It is not popular to talk about the degree of economic inequality in this nation. Often we like to pretend that anyone can get rich, and we have an obsession with lifestyles of rich and famous people, and we did not need Robin Leach for that to be the case. In our nation wealth also correlates strongly with political influence, which tends to further tilt the power of government in the direction of further inequality, perhaps further skewed by the influence of religion - remember that middling rating noted above?
We are unlikely to change some minds with data, but it helps when some offer one set of statistics out of context because it supports their ideology to remind them of the wealth of data that undercuts their arguments.
And for those of us who consider ourselves progressive, perhaps we should pay attention to how poorly our country ranks.
Economic inequality often can warn one of the possibilities of forthcoming disorder and even violence. That should be one salient factor to consider.
Our lack of peacefulness costs us, and not merely in the treasure we have wasted in wars of choice. It puts a stress on many - economic to be sure, also medical, and it should also pressure us for the apparent willingness of some to accept the immorality it indicates is still endemic in too much of our society and our civic discourse.
That's right. For all the rhetoric some offer about religion, the reality is the continuing inequality and willingness to ignore the needs of so many beginning with our rate of infant mortality in a nation of great wealth is a clear indication of immorality.
So congratulations, America. We're #83. Now that's something to be proud of. NOT!
And if I do not end with my normal final salutation, perhaps in the context of this rating, you will understand why.