The developed world? Where's that?

In the last few days I've heard several times the claim that the United States has 4% of the world's population and close to 25% of the confirmed deaths from COVID-19. It's an alarming statistic, partly because of the cognitive dissonance that it generates. Aren't we the richest country in the world? Aren't we scientifically the most advanced? How can we be fucking up so badly?

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.

      

"McFarland" again, or, The unrecognized virtue of poverty

There’s another point to make about the movie “McFarland USA”. It’s about poverty.

 

From time to time rich folks get sentimental about poverty. There’s plenty of literature that celebrates the poor man as nobler and more virtuous than the rich man. And like all deliberate sentimentality, it lies. There is no ipso facto virtue in being poor, and plenty of poor men through the years have been blackhearted scoundrels. One might almost think that some rich man invented this trope in hope of buying off the poor man with praise, to avoid being murdered in his bed or having to part with real cash.

 

But that’s not the whole story. While the trope of the virtuous poor is false, I think that at root it is not so much cynical as unskillful. There is something real that the trope is trying to say; it says the thing badly – it says the thing falsely – but the thing is real all the same. It’s just hard to put into words.

 

“McFarland USA” probably still oversimplifies, but it puts a part of this elusive fact into pictures. And what it shows is this.

 

On the one hand, poverty does nothing to inspire personal virtue. The school is right across from the jail, and we are told that plenty of the school’s graduates end up in jail before too long. One runner’s father is released from jail during the story. He comes home to find his unmarried teenaged daughter pregnant, and throws a violent tantrum. Another character admits he is a reformed gangbanger – his term, not mine. Some guys who are hinted to be his former gang members come looking for him, and there is a fight – offscreen – which leaves blood all over the street. And we see all manner of pettier vices across the community. There’s no more personal virtue in the town of McFarland than in any richer town.

 

What else do we see? Coach White’s wife is driving through town and her car overheats – or, well, something’s wrong with it that involves clouds billowing out from under the hood, we’re not told more than that. One of their neighbors runs a beauty parlor across the street from where the car stops; she brings Mrs. White into her shop, gives her a manicure, and gets her boyfriend to fix the car. Coach White had bought the team running shoes out of his own pocket – the cheapest shoes he could find because that’s all he could afford. The community families put on a tamale sale and car wash to raise money for better shoes and decent uniforms. Coach White forgets his daughter’s fifteenth birthday; but the community mothers band together to put on a quinceañera celebration for her.

 

None of this is about personal virtue. All of it is about helping each other – about social virtue. And this is what’s true about poverty. It doesn’t make anybody better. But it makes everybody need help. We have, deep inside us, a social instinct to help each other. Poverty calls it into action, gives us an occasion to use it. Poverty allows us the chance to help each other, and therefore – oh, so indirectly! – it nurtures an environment in which social virtue can grow. This is why Mrs. White – who hated the town at first (as did the whole family) – finally says that nowhere else has ever felt so much like home. McFarland, because it is so desperately poor, is a healthier community than any richer town could ever be.

 

Nothing is guaranteed. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison writes in “Women and Blacks and Bensonhurst” that in her childhood in Bensonhurst (nobody’s idea of a rich community) people made a virtue of minding their own business. If everyone in the building heard a gunshot from the apartment directly above yours, nobody would investigate and nobody would call the police because “We mind our own business.” A girl in her class had only one eye because her father had knocked out the other one while beating her with a broomstick, and nobody did anything. Poverty doesn’t guarantee that people will help each other. Poverty doesn’t guarantee a healthier community.

 

All it can do is to provide the environment in which a healthy community might grow, if not stunted by other forces. And there is deep inside us, somehow, a voice calling us to help each other. That’s the most we can guarantee in the real world. But even that little is good.