Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is not the best indicator of a nation's well-being. A nation can be relatively wealthy, but many of its people may be living under circumstances of misery and deprivation. Some people may be unable to transform their own wealth into things that really matter to them (think of those with severe disabilities or ill health); background social arrangements may have significant causal effects on individual well-being (think of physical security); and some of the most important components of a person's well-being may be nonmonetary (think of the importance of family and friends).Footnote ¹ A nation's GDP tells us nothing about how its wealth is distributed for different public purposes. (Recall the criticism by Martin Luther King, Jr., of America's priorities in 1967: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”) Nor does GDP reveal how wealth is distributed among a nation's people. It may, therefore, tell us little about how the nation's very poorest members are faring.

The Measure of America: American Human Development Report (AHDR; henceforth “the Report”) takes as its point of departure the incompleteness of the GDP as a measure of a nation's well-being. Building on the widely influential United Nations Human Development Index, the Report seeks to provide a more accurate picture of American society. According to its metric, although our per capita GDP remains virtually unsurpassed (only tiny Luxembourg has a higher GDP), there are good reasons for Americans to be concerned with the state of their country. Over the last three decades of diminished market regulation, increasing globalization, and rising domestic inequality, the lives of many Americans have become worse-off along key dimensions than those of people in many other countries. Economic progress simply does not equate to progress in human well-being.

In this essay, I examine the Report's underlying assumptions. I am particularly interested in the three measures that it offers as a substitute for GDP. These are health (measured in terms of longevity), access to knowledge (measured in terms of years of schooling), and the standard of living (measured in terms of median income). How does the Report calculate these measures? How does it decide that these are the measures that matter most for human well-being?

Before I turn to consider these issues, I want to point out some of the striking conclusions of the Report. It provides a single measure of well-being for all Americans: On a 10-point scale, Americans achieve a modest 5.06.Footnote ² While the utility of this overall measure might be disputed, the Report disaggregates the measure by state and congressional district, as well as by race, gender, and ethnicity. Doing so reveals wide gaps in the measured well-being that Americans achieve; these gaps are especially great when considered across different geographical regions.Footnote ³ For example, the average resident of New York's Fourteenth Congressional District (which encompasses the Upper East Side of Manhattan) earns more than three times as much as the average resident of California's Twentieth District (near Fresno), lives four and a half years longer, and is 10 times as likely to have a college degree (p. 3). The Report also offers suggestive data about the correlation between geographical location and health, educational spending and graduation rates, and gender and income. It documents significant differences in educational spending and rates of educational attainment among different states.

Although it would be inaccurate to portray the Gulf states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi as comprising a Third World country, it is undeniable that there are profound disparities in the level of economic development, education, health, security, and poverty across different regions of America. These states contain counties with some of America's lowest levels of educational attainment, income, and life expectancy. Ethnic and racial disparities also continue to mark America as a fragmented nation. African Americans today have a shorter life span than the average American in the late 1970s (p. 53). In some cases, the disparities in people's lives have been narrowed over the last three decades, but in other cases, these gaps are growing.

By presenting information that shows how different people's lives go along different dimensions of concern, and by highlighting areas of vulnerability, the Report implicitly issues a call to action to egalitarians and to all concerned with the waning reality of the American Dream for so many of our country's citizens. And it arms them with hard data, as well as a set of policy priorities, aimed at improving the measures for all Americans, but especially of those who lag behind.

Nevertheless, the Report does not determinatively settle the “measure” of America and is unlikely to convince those whose underlying assumptions and values differ from those implicitly adopted. Although the Report is meticulous in presenting its methodology and is attentive to its limitations, nevertheless some important issues remain insufficiently analyzed.

First, consider the composite number that measures well-being: 5.06 for the average American. To arrive at this number, as well as other aggregate figures presented (5.01 for females, 7.53 for Asians, etc.), the authors make two key assumptions: 1) that health, income, and education can be measured on a single well-being scale, and 2) that health, income, and education are equally important inputs into that scale and so should be given equal weight. But both these assumptions are obviously controversial. For example, the value that a person may attach to being educated may be different in kind from the value that he or she attaches to having additional income, or it may weigh far more highly as part of that person's well-being.

Second, what about the independent components of health, education, and a standard of living? Although the Report's measures contain much useful information, they also represent a number of controversial decisions, decisions that, moreover, have normative and policy implications. For example, the Report takes longevity as a proxy for health. But is a long life necessarily a healthy life? Should we not be concerned first and foremost with the quality of a person's life and not simply with the years lived? Millions of Americans in their seventies and eighties live, like my mother, in nursing homes where they may be barely functioning. Many people live long lives accompanied by chronic physical and mental pain. While longevity measures can be useful insofar as they reveal the effects of infant mortality, they make less sense as an overall proxy for living a healthy life.Footnote ⁴

Or consider the Report's use of median income as a metric for the standard of living component of the overall human development measure. While median income is arguably a better proxy for this component than per capita GDP, this figure also can be misleading as a measure of well-being. It ignores, for example, people who are working two to three jobs to generate their income, sacrificing leisure and rest, community involvement, and family life. It also ignores the number of people who are unemployed and so earning no income at all. And it ignores people who are incarcerated.Footnote ⁵

Finally, there is this question: How valuable are these three measures for what people actually care about? Although the Report notes that these measures are incomplete as a measure of human development and that some important information is excluded, it defends these three measures as the “basic ingredients of a decent life” (p. 23). In one sense, it is hard to argue with that; some level of health, income, and education seems essential to a person's ability to live a worthwhile life. But above that basic level, many Americans would place far greater weight on alternative components of well-being, such as having a loving family, the quality of their relationships with others, the nature of their physical environment, and their religious commitments. Although its scores lead those of other counties, would most Americans really prefer to live on New York City's Upper East Side?Footnote ⁶

It might be argued, along the lines of Amartya Sen, that the three measures reflect not so much what people most care about but what they have most reason to care about. Or it might be argued that while loving relationships are critically important to human well-being, these are not within the capacity of governments to provide. Or it might be argued that even if these components are not basic, they still should be provided on more equal terms to all Americans.Footnote ⁷ But without such arguments, it remains to be seen whether the “measure of America” is founded on values that most Americans would accept as the core ingredients of their well-being.

The Report is a useful conversation starter; it gives us a wealth of data organized around salient social categories and shows the persistence of systematic disparities. It provides us with measures that more closely track how people's lives go then does the GDP.Footnote ⁸ It is now up to us to decide how to carry forward the conversation about what constitutes well-being for U.S. citizens and how to make it accessible to increasing numbers of Americans.