Is the United States in decline? It’s a more difficult question
to answer than one might expect; it all depends on what you
measure, how you measure, and how you define decline. The world is
dynamic; everything is moving. Decline might not mean moving
backward, it might just mean loss of momentum, or standing still as
the rest of the world goes by.
Is the United States in decline? It’s a more difficult question to answer than one might expect; it all depends on what you measure, how you measure, and how you define decline. The world is dynamic; everything is moving. Decline might not mean moving backward, it might just mean loss of momentum, or standing still as the rest of the world goes by.
Trying to evaluate the national trajectory relative to all the world’s moving parts is difficult like trying to judge the speed of a moving train from another train running alongside. There are both absolute and relative measures. Unless we’re looking carefully, any decline that comes is unlikely to be noticed until long after it sets in; then we will look back and say, “That’s where it started.” That will be too late.
The United States is far ahead of the world in material things; we had a tremendous head start due to geography and the timing of our development and we made good use of it. The U.S. is the third most populous nation behind China and India, but our average and median standard of living far outpaces both.
We have brought 313 million people to the point where most of them have adequate food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, access to knowledge, and reasonable basic healthcare. Look around the world and you can see that is no small feat. Before countering with poverty statistics, remember that poverty is usually a relative – not absolute – measure.
Using the 2010 United Nations Human Development Index, HDI, that measures life expectancy at birth, mean and expected years of schooling, and the standard of living, the U.S. comes in fourth among 42 very high development countries behind Norway, Australia, and New Zealand. The combined population of the three nations ahead of us is only 31 million, less than 10 percent of ours.
Naturally, there are individual inequalities within every nation. Scientists developed an inequality-adjusted HDI to try to account for those differences. Applying the inequality-adjustment, the U.S. drops from 4 to 12 among the 30 rated countries, but the difference is not as much as you might think.
After the inequality adjustment, the U.S. scored 0.799. The population-weighted average for the 11 nations with better scores was 0.821 a difference of 2.7 percent. Additionally, the total population of those 11 nations was only 191 million. To equal the U.S. population one would have to add the entire populations of the 4 countries that trail us – Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, Austria and then half the population of Spain, which follows Austria.
The previous is mostly good news; the bad news is that we have bought much of our prosperity with borrowed money and our relative educational accomplishment is slipping badly. According to a 2010 article in the New York Times, “The United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.”
We have one last advantage compared to other developed nations; we have a younger population. The median age in the U.S is 36.9 years. For example, the median age in the United Kingdom is 40.0, Sweden 42.0, Austria 43.0, and Germany 44.9. This buys us some time. Unfortunately, some of the poorest nations in the world have the lowest median population ages and that may cause massive social upheaval.
Considering all the factors, I would say the United States is not in decline, but our trajectory is flat, we are marking time and it could go either way from here.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident.
