But wait. Why do we say that the United States is the richest country in the world? We have the world's highest GDP, of course. But we are also a big country, so by itself that doesn't make us rich. Do we have the highest GDP per capita? No, it turns out that's Luxembourg, or perhaps Monaco or Liechtenstein (depending on who does the calculation). Fine, but those are all small countries, so the qualification "per capita" means dividing by a very small denominator. What about comparing to countries that most Americans can find on a map? Without digressing too far into the question of how geographically literate Americans might be, our GDP per capita still falls below that of Norway, though we run a bit ahead of Australia.
But surely these numbers are meaningless. The United States is a huge country, and nobody pretends that the wealth is evenly distributed. Any number that relies on calculating a median income is going to distort the reality in important ways.
So yesterday I decided to see whether there are any available results that describe the level of economic development inside the United States at a county-by-county level. I decided to use the Human Development Index (HDI) as a metric (see the link for an explanation of the formula), and started googling for economic and demographic data. I didn't find exactly what I wanted, so I made some estimations (in respect to some of the inputs) that may skew the final numbers by a bit. But the results were still interesting.
The Human Development Index ranges (in principle) between 0 and 1. Based on global data in 2018, countries with ah HDI < 0.400 include Somalia, Niger, and the Central African Republic. Scores between 0.500 and 0.549 include countries like Sudan, New Guinea, and Syria. Scores between 0.700 and 0.749 include Bolivia, Venezuela, Libya, and Mongolia. All American counties scored higher than these. But not all of them were a lot higher: the lowest-scoring American county came in with an HDI (by my calculation) of 0.7803. And the overall breakdown was something like this:
- HDI between 0.750 and 0.799: 11 counties. Comparable nations include Sri Lanka, Albania, and Serbia.
- HDI between 0.800 and 0.849: 597 counties. Comparable nations include Malaysia, Oman, and Qatar.
- HDI between 0.850 and 0.899: 1811 counties (more than half!). Comparable nations include Portugal, Cyprus, and Spain.
- HDI of 0.900 or above: 659 counties. Comparable nations include Slovenia, USA (!), and Norway.
So I found that interesting, for a couple of reasons. One is that you really can see how taking an arithmetical mean distorts the results: taken as a whole, the USA falls into the top category, but only a little over a fifth of our counties make it there on their own. Clearly the numbers in those counties are high enough to pull up the rest of the country. On average.
On the other hand, that top category is the second-largest. If you cluster the bottom two categories together you get a group that is almost the same size as the top group, and you can consider those the two tails of a normal bell distribution. It makes sense.
Most important, though -- at least from my perspective -- is that over half of our counties are in the second-highest category. So maybe we should stop thinking of ourselves as sitting at the top of the development heap. Maybe it helps to think of ourselves, instead, as a large and dynamic developing nation, with political institutions that are a couple of centuries old and that date from a smaller, more rural, and more agricultural time. Maybe if we saw ourselves that way it wouldn't be so amazing that we failed to react to the coronavirus as decisively and (seemingly) successfully as countries that truly occupy the top rank of the Developed World: places like Germany, South Korea, and Hong Kong.
And maybe their example can give us something to aspire to.
