> >> The U.S. is maybe the only industrial country that doesn't do this.
> >> India has a regular publication of social indicators
> >=========
> >Exskweeeze me, the US doesn't keep social statistics?
>
> Missed that the first time around. What the hell is Noam talking about
> here?
>From Noam Chomsky, *Propaganda and the Public Mind* (South End Press,
2001), pp. 175f.:
In the United States, unlike other industrial countries, there's no national government review of social statistics, but there are private reviews. The main one is done at Fordham University, a Jesuit university in New York, which has an institute that publishes regular annual measures of social indicators like child abuse, hunger, illiteracy, and average wages. They also have a composite measure. The results are interesting. They just came out with their latest volume. [Marc L. Miringoff and Marque-Luisa Miringoff, *The Social Health of the Nation: How America is Really Doing* (New York: Oxford UP, 1999).] From about, say, 1960 up until the mid-1970s, social indicators improved. Indicators tracked GDP, gross domestic product. GDP is a kind of mixed measure. It doesn't measure economic health in any reasonable sense, but it measures something.
So with the growth of the economy by this gross measure, social indicators improved. The line was practically the same line. It tracks it closely. In the mid-1970s the two curves separate. GDP continues to go up, social indicators start to go down, not just stagnate. And they've been going down since the mid-1970s, with a slight upturn in the late 1990s. They're now at a level of about 1959, when the study started.
What happened in the mid-1970s? The U.S. started undergoing reforms, not unlike the structural adjustment programs designed for the poor countries. And with the usual consequences. Here's the leading democracy of the South and the leading democracy of the North showing very much the same pattern. The Fordham investigators called this a "social recession" in the United States. It's one part of the story which is not shown in the applause for the wonderful new era we're in...