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This is not a report about one group of Americans or another; it is about all of us," said Kristen Lewis, co-author of the report. "By ranking the fifty states, the 436 congressional districts, and the major racial and ethnic groups, the American Human Development Index allows everyone to see where his or her community fits in terms of access to opportunity and standard of living.

 

The American Human Development Project is a non-profit initiative established to introduce to the United States an international approach and more accurate tool for measuring human well-being: the human development approach and the human development index - to provide a true 'measure of America'..

The Project has produced the American Human Development Report  modelled on the UN Development Programme's global Human Development Report, which has provided clear authoritative analysis and a ranked index for countries around the world for almost two decades. The report computes well being through a single measure for all Americans based on indicators in the area of health, education, and income to more accurately reflect where we are all at. . 

The Report shows that although the United States is still one of the richest countries in the world it is trailing behind iother industrialised nations in providing opportunities and choices to all its citizens and in that sense its a clear and accurate measure of how many Americans are suffering and being left behind.

Facts and Findings from the Report include.  

Health

The U.S. ranks #24 among the 30 most affluent countries in life expectancy – yet spends more on health care than any other nation.

The U.S. infant mortality rate is on par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland; if the U.S. infant mortality rate were the same as that of top-ranked Sweden, 21,000 more American babies would live to celebrate their first birthdays every year. 

Premature death by homicide is more than five times higher in the U.S. than the OECD average; 68 percent of U.S. homicides in 2006 were committed with a firearm.

Nearly a third of all female murder victims were killed by intimate partners (husbands and boyfriends).

More than one million Americans are living with HIV.

Access to Knowledge

By age three, the children of affluent mothers have vocabularies twice as large as those of the children of low-income mothers

Among four-year-olds, 40 percent of children from disadvantaged backgrounds were proficient in number and shape recognition, compared to 87 percent of children from privileged families.

Fourteen percent of the population – some 30 million Americans – lacks the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks like understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals

Twelve percent of Americans lack the literacy skills to fill in a job application or payroll form, read a map or bus schedule, or understand labels on food and drugs.

More than one in five Americans – 22 percent of the population – have “below basic” quantitative skills, making it impossible to balance a checkbook, calculate a tip, or figure out from an advertisement the amount of interest on a loan. 

Nationally, Asian males have the highest human development index score and African American males the lowest, with a staggering 50-year gap between the two groups.

Standard of Living

The top 1 percent of U.S. households possesses a full third of America’s wealth.

Households in the top 10 percent of the income distribution hold more than 71 percent of the country’s wealth, while those in the lowest 60 percent possess just 4 percent.

Nearly one in five American children lives in poverty, with more than one in thirteen living in extreme poverty.

The poverty line for a family of four (two adults and two children) is an income of $21,027 before taxes; in 2006, more than 36 million Americans were classified poor by this definition.

The Measure of America Report is published by  Columbia University Press and the Social Science Research Council but the American Human Development Project website features extracts from the current report , accompanying maps, Excel data tables and details about the project and a blog.

The blog aims to provide an onward going Human development focus and resource and the current item explains how a new statistical measure of poverty introduced by Mayor Bloomberg to address poverty in  New York takes account of  housing,  transportation , utilities and childcare costs whereas the old standard federal measure was simply calculated on the cost of three square meals a day. The poverty line for a family of four under the federal measure is $20,444; under the new Bloomberg NYC measure, it is $26,138.

The Measure of America website also lets you check out your own well being using the well-o-meter 

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