The economist Amartya Sen has said that world development ought to focus on the capabilities that people achieve, and not simply on aggregate economic indicators. In that spirit, the United Nations since 1990 has published several Human Development (HD) reports that assess nations in terms of health and education conditions, as well as income or wealth. Many countries have assessed their own HD. In The Measure of America, Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, and Eduardo Borges Martins apply this approach to the United States. They describe variation in health, education, and income conditions across American states, congressional districts, and social groups.
The authors portray social diversity within America with uncommon clarity. They find that northern and western states have higher HD than does the South, but there are pockets of underdevelopment even in rich states like California or New York. Asians and whites generally score higher than blacks and Latinos, but in some respects women outscore men. Excellent graphics convey this complexity without obscuring the overall themes.
As recently as 1990, the United States ranked second in world HD rankings, but by 2005 it had fallen to twelfth, behind several other rich countries. The authors blame this on America's failure to do enough for its most disadvantaged regions and groups—especially the South, blacks, and Latinos. They call for expanded early childhood programs, improved public schools, universal health coverage, paid family leave, and a higher minimum wage to counter growing income inequality. Liberal social analysts will applaud.
The authors, however, fail to persuasively show that American HD is clearly lacking or that their recommendations would improve it. Perhaps world development has overemphasized economics, but the United States never did. Government efforts to expand access to education predate the Founding, and both health and education have been preoccupations of national antipoverty policy since at least the Great Society.
Differences in HD across the United States are surprisingly small. The whole country is advancing toward better health and education as well as higher income. The authors profess alarm that black men or Mississippians are living at the same level as average Americans did 15 or 20 years ago (pp. 32; 39), but those gaps are trivial compared to the chasms that separate nations. The indicators miss the real American social problem: Large differences in social functioning between high and low—especially in employment, crime, and unwed pregnancy—have undercut social unity, even as measurable HD has improved.
The authors also fail to explain HD differences well. They blame them largely on inequities in what society does for people. Successful groups get more from the economy and government than do the less successful. But the authors underemphasize the enormous differences in what people do for themselves. They mention obesity and school failure as problems for blacks and Latinos, but they trace these to insufficient early childhood investment. They mention high “unemployment” among poor adults, but not the fact that many fail even to look for work. While they say that individuals share with society the responsibility for HD, they levy demands for change only on government.
The authors overstate what more investment could achieve. They largely ignore selection issues. They note, for instance, that quality health care or education predicts high HD, but that may be only because more capable people generate both better inputs and better outcomes, not because inputs cause outcomes. Thus, policies seeking to enrich health or education would not produce comparable results for the disadvantaged. The authors also underestimate the practical difficulties of improving early childhood education, health care, or schools, such as tangled administration and the resistance of teacher unions.
This project claims to look beyond economics, but it speaks largely in economic terms. America lags in HD, the authors say, because other countries are “more efficient in transforming income into positive health and education outcomes” (p. 13), as if wealth could generate HD through a production function. They recommend “intervention,” “resources,” and “investing” in people, even a “Marshall Plan” for the poorest southern states. They admit that more public spending is not enough, yet they recommend little else. Since the United States already spends more on health and education than other countries, how could spending even more do much to solve our social problems?
Measure is a throwback to the determinist style of the Great Society, where even the personal problems of the poor were attributed entirely to their environment. Recently, more conservative policies have expanded benefits but also expected more of government's clients—a combination of “help and hassle.” Welfare reform subsidized unskilled jobs but also demanded that welfare mothers work in return for aid. School reform spent more on education but also set clearer standards for teachers and students. Criminal justice imprisoned more offenders while lately spending more to rehabilitate them. All these reforms cost money, yet their basis was public authority rather than economics—enforcing the values essential to a functioning society.
In response, work levels rose in poor areas while welfare and crime fell, and school performance has begun to rise. By raising earnings, welfare reform sharply slowed the rise in inequality that the authors criticize. These steps would also seem consistent with HD, since they directly promoted key capabilities—working, learning, and obeying the law. However, the authors criticize school and criminal justice reform as too severe—and they ignore welfare reform entirely.
Why? Probably because, to them, the conservative style is unconscionable. Social policy should be earnest and expert. Well-intentioned analysts like themselves should study the less fortunate, calculate what they need, then call upon the better-off to provide it. To conservatives, in contrast, social policy is something tougher and more low brow. Leaders must agree on social standards, then promote them through new spending and enforcement. Both administrators and clients have to change, and that produces progress. For one side, policy essentially means redistribution; for the other it means governance based on authority.
The authors say that Sen's idea of capabilities implies “freedom” but also “agency,” or the ability to choose one's own life (pp. 14, 21). Their proposals would liberate people in the sense of shifting some burdens to the society. “Agency,” however, requires that people take responsibility for themselves. The authors never explain how “investing” in people makes them do that. Under their plans, clients receive more, but they need not do more. The conservative approach more directly produces capabilities by requiring them. It speaks of obligations first, only then of freedom. Behaving well is seen as essential to living a free life.
George Lakoff has argued that policy positions today usually reflect competing images of the family, rather than traditional ideologies.Footnote 1 Behind the liberal position lies the vision of a “nurturant parent” who invests in children, setting a moral example but expecting little overtly from them. Behind the conservative stance lies the image of a “strict father” who teaches children good behavior, in order to foster independence.Footnote 2 Measure exemplifies the first attitude, conservative prescriptions the second. On the evidence, stricter structure is closer to what the less privileged need. Government also can provide that; it is too impersonal to nurture. The irony is that liberals embrace government but pursue an intimate social ideal that only strong families can provide. Conservatives distrust government, yet their vision is a civic one that government can achieve.
Measure is excellent applied social science—at least of the type that dominates academe. The authors use data bases to measure and analyze social conditions, then call upon government to change certain determinants so that conditions improve. This genre, however, typically ignores the roles of politics and administration. Standard databases do not capture these influences. To gauge them takes messy fieldwork that today lacks academic prestige. But without incorporating politics and administration, recommendations are often impolitic, and analyses miss the capacity of agencies to make or break social interventions. However earnest and expert, research like Measure lacks enough governmental content to interest policymakers.
Instead, policy research should propose policies, then show concretely how leaders and administrators can enact and implement them. Examples can be found in welfare reform,Footnote 3 school reform,Footnote 4 or criminal justice.Footnote 5 Such research will be more eclectic and judgmental, tougher to publish in the journals, than purely statistical work like Measure. But it has more governmental content and is more likely to gain an audience outside academe. Of all social sciences, political science should be most able to combine policy argument with institutional analysis. It truly could be, as the ancients imagined, the master science.Footnote 6
The authors rightly fear the emergence of a hierarchical society, but their analysis reflects that trend rather than reversing it. Today's society is dominated by the meritocracy. The universities produce leaders who excel at school, while at the bottom of society the less competent have largely given up competing. The first group is largely white and Asian, the latter heavily black, Latino, and immigrant. The first lives disciplined lives, while the second often has trouble with school, work, and marriage. Meritocracy produces history's most impressive aristocracy. But its victory is Pyrrhic, as it finds itself presiding over a demoralized lower class.Footnote 7
The difference in lifestyle is so great that all sense of a common society has withered. Most social analysts look down on the disadvantaged from a great height, seeing them only as unfortunates entitled to solicitude. They cannot imagine expecting of them the order or effort they expect of themselves or their own children. Conservatives seek, rather, to reaffirm the civilities that might restore some sense of commonness. The first approach is well intentioned but condescending, the second more hostile but also more respectful.
Fifty years ago, America had lower HD than today, but conditions were improving rapidly because the less fortunate were more hopeful and harder working than they have since become. Jim Crow still existed, but the society was otherwise less divided and more trusting than currently. That was a populist America in which sophisticated people often felt unappreciated. Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized it, and sophisticates like Henry Adams went into exile. Today, in a more elitist society, the universities are riding high and intellectuals are a lot more comfortable. Adams and his ilk have returned home. Theirs is the milieu that generated Measure. But America is no longer the democratic society it was.
