Income and Health Inequalities Cut U.S.

s High Marks for Development

By Katherine Harmon | November 2, 2011
If global development were a horse race, would you put your money on the slow-andsteady contenders or a fast new contender? With this years results just in, the old stalwart Scandinavian countries are still in the lead, according to the 2011 United Nations Human Development Index, published Wednesday. With Norway leading the charge in this annual assessment of national education, health and income levels, most of the other 186 countries and territories evaluated in this years report are also on the up and up. The U.S. ranks fourthwith Australia and the Netherlands inching out just ahead.

This chart shows the shift in the U.N. development index for Norway (top purple), the U.S. (second purple), Turkey (green) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (red) from 1990 to 2011

When the national numbers, based on factors such as life expectancy, poverty and years spent in school, are recalculated to account for internal inequalities, however, the U.S. falls to the 23rd spotthe largest drop of any of the top 85 countries in this analysis. The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index helps us assess better the levels of development for all segments of society, rather than for just the mythical average person, Milorad Kovacevic, the lead statistician for the report, said in a prepared statement. We consider health and education distribution to be just as important in this equation as income. And the data show great inequalities. The U.S.s slide is due primarily to income inequality (a phrase thats now peppering the headlines courtesy of the recent Occupy Wall Street protests nationwide). But, the report suggests, it also took a hit from the uneven distribution of health care. The U.S. spends 7.1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health (U.S. public spending on education is 5.5 percent). And although life expectancy is now 78.5 years in the U.S., it is still years off from the corresponding statistics in Australia and the Netherlands, which both have life expectancies of more than 80 yearsand spend less of their respective GDPs on health costs.

This world map shows the 2011 U.N. development indexes across the globe. Countries with "very high" index numbers are blue and those with the lowest numbers are light green.

Development is not, of course, a zero-sum competition. And as the birth of the purported seven billionth person earlier this week has emphasized, rapidly depleting natural resources are a very real concern for the whole globe. According to the authors of the new report, a smarter, more sustainable development strategy tide could raise all shipsand with so many developing nations, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where life expectancy is 48.4 years and 73 percent of the population lives in poverty, there are many ships that need a smart development strategy, and fast.

Sustainability is not exclusively or even primarily an environmental issue, Helen Clark, who chairs the U.N. Development Program, said in a prepared statement. It is fundamentally about how we choose to live our lives, with an awareness that everything we do has consequences for the seven billion of us here today, as well as for the billions more who will follow. Charts courtesy of U.N. Human Development Report About the Author: Katherine Harmon is a reporter for Scientific American covering health, medicine, neuroscience and general life sciences for the website. Follow on Twitter @katherineharmon.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.