> On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > >> 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.
=======
And where do they get their data from? How accurate is it? Collecting
and collating that stuff is *expensive*.
Not surprising the Jesuits do it though--they're the CIA of the
Catholic church.
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...
=========
Well the US system of National Accounts could definitely be much
better, but does anybody remember the broohaha over the CPI? Imagine
the citizenry filling out stuff like literacy info or sex life data
on their census forms...not gonna happen, ever.
Hell even trying to get a robust version of Daly and Cobb's Index of
Sustainable Economic Welfare operationalized by the Feds would cause a
bureaucratic revolution. A bunch of business groups just asked the
Dept. of Commerce to collect more data from the citizenry in order to
render us more predictable, socializing the research costs......
Ian