Citizens’ basic needs are being met, but they lack opportunities

By THE DATA TEAM

IS LIFE for people around the world getting better? Number-crunchers have various methods for answering that pressing question, and have released new figures for many of them in the past month. When it comes to the basic requirements for a healthy and self-sufficient life, they agree that the world has made enormous progress in recent decades. On September 18th the United Nations and World Bank reported that the number of children dying before their fifth birthdays has fallen by more than half since 1990. Four days earlier, the United Nations Development Programme released its latest data for the Human Development Index (HDI), which combines measures of income, life expectancy and education. It shows that the share of people living in countries with low HDI scores has fallen from 60% in 1990 to 12% today.

But not all the figures are so rosy. Since 2006 Gallup, a pollster, has tracked the proportion of people around the world who say that they have felt stressed, worried, pained, angry or sad on the previous day. That share has been rising since 2011. This year’s results, which Gallup published on September 12th, found that the average rate across the five negative emotions in 2017 was a record 30%. Also concerning is the global downward trend in the liveability index that the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company, has produced since 2007. The average score, which ranks major cities based on violence, healthcare, education, infrastructure, education and culture, has been falling since the index’s inception. This year’s figures, published in August, showed yet another drop.

This mix of progress and decline appears in the most elaborate measure of quality of life, the Social Progress Index (SPI), the latest version of which was released today. The Social Progress Imperative, an American non-profit, devised the ratings in 2013. They are designed to ignore economic performance and to focus instead on human experiences. The 51 variables fall into three categories: “basic human needs”, such as food, sanitation, shelter and safety; “foundations of well-being”, which include rudimentary education, healthcare and the environment; and “opportunities”, which are comprised of rights, freedoms, societal inclusiveness and higher learning.

All of these benefits are highly correlated with wealth. Five-sixths of the differences between countries’ SPI scores can be explained by their GDP per capita alone. But the distinction that the index draws between different types of progress is enlightening. In the four years since it first appeared, the average scores for basic human needs and foundations of well-being have increased in almost every region, while the provision of opportunities has decreased in many parts of the world.

That divergence has been particularly stark in India, which has made great progress in providing food and shelter while losing ground on personal rights and inclusiveness. China has earned some extra points by expanding its access to tertiary education, but still lags behind the rest of Asia in terms of overall opportunities. And the United States is sliding in the wrong direction in all three categories of progress, thanks to an increase in murders and traffic deaths, declining access to healthcare and education, and the erosion of freedom of expression. America’s economy might be booming, but its social data tell a gloomier story.