I love my country. From sea to shining sea. From the redwood forests to the Gulfstream waters. Truly I do.
Not in that nationalistic, super-patriotic, bloody-minded way that actually extended the country to those supposedly God-ordained boundaries on the Atlantic and Pacific. That was a nasty bit of business that left many trails of tears and bodies, as did much U.S. behavior in the other countries of the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia.
Not because of the fact that we have more official memorials to the Confederate general who co-founded the Ku Klux Klan than to Abraham Lincoln's partner in winning the Civil War, Frederick Douglass. Quite the message is delivered by that.
Not for the plutocrats, whose rule has ebbed and flowed throughout our history, but now stands at high tide.
What I love is that on every issue of importance throughout our history there have always been people who demand the country live up to its ideals. People who insisted that the-way-things-have-always-been-done wasn't good enough, and relentlessly struggled for something better no matter how long it took, no matter how daunting the risk. People who believed that democracy worthy of the name must always include a steady chipping away at the age-old economic golden rule: He who has the gold, rules. Praise be to these activists.
In that let's-be-all-we-can-be sense, I'm very much a patriot. In matters that matter, I want the United States to be No. 1. Unfortunately, in metric after metric, we aren't No. 1. Not even close. And too few people are asking why the hell that's the case and why aren’t we doing something to correct it.
And when somebody does raise the issue, they don’t typically ask the right questions or focus on the right issues. You can bet that Donald Trump’s campaign slogan for tonight’s Republican National Convention—“Make America First Again”—won’t be making it first where it really matters.
We are No. 1 in overall military spending. However you count it, the United States spends vastly more on its military than any other nation. Indeed, it spends more than the next 15 nations combined. According to the highly respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 39 percent of military spending on the planet is America's. The United States has hundreds more military bases outside its own territory than any other country, more nuclear warheads, and devices with which to deliver them.
We are No. 1 in total gross domestic product at $18.23 trillion. For 60 years, that was true in per capita terms, too. Now, however, we are No. 15.
And yet … we are tied for 45th on literacy.
We are No. 33 in childhood poverty, according to a study of 38 nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. One in five U.S. children is born poor.
We come in at No. 10 for income inequality before taxes and transfers, and second after taxes and transfers among 31 developed countries, as measured by the Gini Index.
Laughable claims are still made for the United States being No. 1 in having the "best health care in the world." The Social Progress Index ranks the United States 70th in health. Insurance coverage, access, fairness, quality, and patient satisfaction are all well below most of the other developed countries.
We are No. 1 in percentage of GDP spent on health-care expenditures, and more than twice the OECD average. But on many measures of health the U.S. fares poorly. We have not invested adequately in primary care. Our public health system is in a shambles.
We are 8th among the G-20 nations when it comes to the number of practicing physicians per 1,000 population.
We rank a miserable WTF on infant mortality, at No. 42. In 1960, the United States was 12th. In 2004, it had slipped to 29th. Other nations have improved well beyond us. All kinds of bogus excuses are made.
In life expectancy at birth, the United States, the biggest military spender, the richest nation on the planet, comes in at No. 30.
The Social Progress Index puts us at 31st in personal safety, 69th for ecosystem sustainability, 39th in basic education, and 34th in access to water and sanitation.
We are 5th in competitiveness worldwide, 15th in infrastructure and technological readiness, and an appalling 37th in energy architecture.
We rank 41st in press freedom.
Those numbers put our military spending and our GDP into sharp relief. For one thing they tell us, once again, just how inadequate GDP is as a measure of economic well being. I’m not arguing that GDP has no value. It does. And adjustments in the past decade have made it a better measure of what it measures. So what’s so bad about it? Mostly what it doesn’t measure. Even as a purely economic index, it fails.
For instance, take pollution. GDP measures as income a manufactured product that creates pollution as a byproduct. It then measures the clean-up as income. And it then measures health services to those sickened by the pollution as income.
GDP also leaves out things like income distribution, the intensity of poverty, economic security, crime costs, the economic value of civic and voluntary work, the economic value of unpaid housework, and childcare. It’s a measure that assigns zero value to leisure time, to the depletion of resources, to the loss of wetlands and species and ice-caps, to the benefits of saving, to trade imbalances, to deficits and debt.
As Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago, has said:
So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives. That GDP is thrown on top of all the GDP that comes from gambling and fraud of one kind or another. It’s a more straightforward description of what Kenneth Rogoff and the Economist would call the financialization of the American economy. That transformation is a big part of the American economic model as it has morphed in some very perverse directions in the last 30 or 40 years. [...]
Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work and delivers the goods and it’s the only model that an advanced country can do to be competitive in this world. I mean that not just in terms of exports, but in terms of being green at the same time. That we can raise the standard of living without boiling the planet shows how our measure of GDP is so crude.
Despite all their flag pins, too few of our politicians—especially but not exclusively Republicans—care about our stinky rankings in so many arenas. Because what does it profit them?