Happy Birthday USA! Has America Delivered On Its Promise?

America's 250-year legacy isn't just about survival, it's about how well it delivers on the promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Shockingly, the U.S. earns a failing grade in these core areas, despite its economic greatness. But what does this mean for America's future, and can it turn things around?

Using the Social Progress Index, Michael Green shares new insights on how America has progressed since 1990 to today. He compares America to similarly income-level countries, including some European ones, to highlight areas where the country is struggling and should be doing better.

Michael analyzes all the details, from education to safety and health, to see why the United States' quality of life has been declining since 2011.

Happy Birthday to the USA! We hope that you continue working to deliver your promise: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness for everyone.

Explore the U.S. Social Progress Map covering all 50 states, the largest 500 cities and its 32,000 census tracts. https://www.socialprogress.org/us

Do you prefer to have a broad view of the United States? Navigate the results of the Global Social Progress Index. https://www.socialprogress.org/social-progress-index

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Beyond GDP podcast, where we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. And as part of that celebration, we're going to be digging into the data to ask: has America delivered on the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? The results are quite shocking. With its semi-quincentennial, as they call it, the United States, the world's longest running democratic republic, hits a new milestone. And it is a huge achievement. Just think, in the lifetime of this one republic, France has had five republics. Or think about Poland, which was actually the second country in the world to have a written constitution. But after then it's gone through partition, occupation, obliteration from the BAP, in the same period when the US has just rumbled on as one republic. There's a point in life when survival itself is a cause for celebration, all of its own. And 250 years is a great age for a public. Congratulations, USA. But let's press a bit harder. Can America celebrate not just survival, but success after 250 years? Now this looks like a bit of a no-brainer. From nukid on the block and fighting for its life in 1776, the US is, for the time being at least, the world's greatest economic and military power, probably the greatest power in world history. Job done, trophy won, USA, USA. But hold your horses for a moment. The United States is not like other countries. At its inception, it told us what it was trying to achieve and what it wanted to be judged by. It wasn't measures of economic might or military muscle that the new republic aspired to, but rather its citizens' ability to exercise their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And by those measures, I'm sorry to say, there can be no prizes, no party. Judged in terms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the US on this 250th anniversary gets an F failing grade. In this podcast, I'm going to explain in detail how we calculated the score, what it tells us about life in America today, how the US got to this parlour state, and what can we done to turn it around to celebrate an A grade of the next big anniversary. In terms of the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the US today is earning a failing grade. This may sound harsh, and I'm sorry to rain on the semi-quincentennial parade, but the numbers don't lie. The Founding Fathers didn't leave us with a measurement framework for life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness. So to track America's performance, I'm using the Social Progress Index, which maps extraordinarily well onto these goals. For life, we measure basic human needs, the needs to the things you need to stay alive, food, water, shelter, and safety. For liberty, we measure opportunity in terms of rights, freedoms, inclusion, and access to advanced education. And for the pursuit of happiness, we base that on foundations of well-being, education, information, and the health of our bodies and the environment. Does social progress sound a bit suspicious to you? Is this a deliberate hatchet job on the US? No. Social progress just means good quality of life. And the Social Progress Index was developed under the leadership of the eminent Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter. He is no socialist and he is an undoubted American patriot. The social progress itself is based on measures of outcomes, not inputs. We're not making judgments about what your school system is like, what your health system is like, what your legal framework is, and so on. We're simply asking things like do people have a water supply? What's the rate of violent crime? Do kids learn in school? What's life expectancy? Can people exercise their rights? It's actually amazing how much we agree when we talk about outcomes. The controversy is usually about the means. Social Progress Index is only about the outcomes. And the data? Well, it all comes from trusted global sources and has been through rigorous screening. We've been doing this for more than 10 years now, and our methodology is transparent and open to review. With that preamble out of the way, why is America getting an F on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Well, there are actually four reasons. Reason number one, the US ranks just 32nd in the world out of 171 countries on social progress. Now, you might expect the US to be behind those sort of smug socialist Scandinavians. Norway is number one country in the world after all, or maybe a few of those small countries with turbocharged GDP like Ireland, Luxembourg, or Singapore. But it's worse than that. At 32nd place, the US is bottom of the G7, below Germany, the UK, France, Canada, Japan, and Italy. The US scores worse than the whole of the European Union, and is behind even newer members of the EU like Poland and Cyprus. Yes, America is better than 171st ranked Central African Republic, but that's no win. 32nd place is just not good enough to be called a leader in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Reason number two, it's getting worse. Since 2011, US social progress has declined. In those 15 years, almost every other country has improved, some by large amounts. The US is one of only four countries that's gone backwards in that period, places like Venezuela. In that period since 2011, countries have suffered war, economic collapse, yet they've still improved their level of social progress. The US economy has boomed, and yet social progress has still declined. That's got to get UNF. Reason number three. The US is richer than most of the countries it's losing out to. The US has the seventh highest GDP per capita in the world. Relative to its wealth, it's hugely underperforming. Countries that underperform on social progress against their GDP per capita are usually extractive economies like Saudi Arabia or Guyana, or effective dictatorships like Russia. No other advanced economy underperforms like the US does. Or put another way, the US has the resources to offer a quality of life on a par with Denmark's. It just chooses not to. That's just not good enough to get a passing grade on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Reason number four, and this is the kicker, it didn't used to be this way. We can actually take the Social Progress Index measure back to 1990, just at the point of victory in the Cold War. At that time, America was doing well economically, seventh highest GDP per capita in the world, just as it is now. But it was also doing well in terms of social progress, eighth highest in the world, right up there with those Nordics and other European countries. Don't tell me that the Social Progress Index is biased against the US, although the US is different because it's big. America used to be good at this stuff, but has lost its way in the last 35 years. That's got to be a fail. So that's it. With its low standing in the rankings, poor performance relative to its wealth, and its negative trajectory, the only grade the US can get on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is, sadly, an F. Next, we're going to break this down in two ways. First, where is the US strong and weak? And second, when did it all go wrong? And spoiler here, if you think it's all about Trump, you're wrong. The United States gets a failing grade on delivering on its people's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let's break that down and find out where the problems lie. We'll break this out into life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Life. Here is America's social progress scorecard for basic human needs, which is our measure of life. The rank gives you a sense of overall performance, and the traffic light gives you a sense of performance relative to countries of similar wealth. Red is bad, blue is good, yellow is average. What we see here is that the US is performing poorly, just 51st in the world, in absolute terms, and underperforming compared to its economic peers with a red light. Safety jumps out as a key issue. 99 in the world, and it doesn't matter what indicator of safety you use, whether it's violence, traffic deaths and injuries, feeling safe walking alone, the US does poorly on all of them. Housing is also red flagged. Why? Simple. Unaffordable housing. Lots of other rich countries have the same problem, but not all of them. And even nutrition and medical care is a slight weakness. The US ranks 50th in the world on infant mortality and 65th on maternal mortality. All of these weaknesses are denying Americans the right to life. Let's turn to Liberty now, where the US should be doing great. That's what the nation was founded on after all. And the score here is better, if not great, twenty-fifth in the world, and not significantly worse than peers in terms of its wealth. But hold the celebrations. Freedom and choice is an area of weakness, too much early marriage, and Americans themselves say they don't have freedom over life choices. A hundred and fourteenth in the world on that measure. Rights is not terrible, but thirty-seventh in the world is nothing to cheer about. Similarly, inclusion is okay, but ninety-fourth in the world on discrimination and violence against minorities? And then there's higher education. American universities are the envy of the world. Got to be number one, right? Wrong. The US yes is number one for quality ranked universities, but poor scores on academic freedom and citable documents, that's academic productivity, pull the US down to 23rd. Finally, let's look at the pursuit of happiness, which the Social Progress Index calls foundations of well-being. Alas, another red mark, and the US is just 31st in the world. What's going wrong? Well look, my kids might not agree with me yet, but a good education is key to a good and happy life, and the US education system is simply not delivering. 47th in the world overall. Perhaps most damning of all, Americans don't really feel that their kids grow and learn at school. America is 84th in the world on this indicator. Whatever the failings of the education system, they're dwarfed by the scale of the problems in healthcare. The US spends 17% of GDP, which is one out of every six dollars on healthcare. That's more than any other country in the world. Yet the US ranks just forty-fifth in terms of health outcomes. And that's on a par with Jordan, by the way. It's not that there aren't great hospitals and doctors in the US, it's just that too many people can't access them. The US ranks 98th in the world on equal access to quality health care. And that lack of access means poor outcomes, 28th in the world on life expectancy at 65. Healthcare in the US also comes with huge financial burdens on lower and middle-income households. And let's not also forget the lifestyle factors, particularly related to food, that are making health all the worse. Hence the US comes in at 92nd in the world on non-communicable diseases that are so linked to lifestyle. On the other issues here, environmental quality is okay overall, as is access to information and communication. But a low score on internet access, 32nd in the world, points to digital deserts and excluded groups. And is 50th in the world good enough on press freedom? And that indicator's getting worse. So that's a breakdown of how the US performs on the different aspects of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Next we'll look at how America's social progress has evolved since 1990 to get to where we are today. The US now ranks 32nd in the world behind its G7 peers. But it didn't used to be that way. In 1990, the US had the eighth highest social progress in the world, third in the G7, just behind Canada and Germany. America, you used to be good at this. So when did it go wrong? Well we can break this into two parts. The first phase from 1990 to 2010, the US shows slow and steady improvement on social progress, by about five points in total. That's okay, but it's slower than the countries around it. This is a period when Europe is booming after the end of the Cold War, and there's a surge in economic and social progress, particularly within the European Union. The second phase from 2011 to now sees US social progress stall and go into reverse. The drop in the rankings from 18th in 2011 to 32nd in 2025 reflects a decline in the US social progress index score by nearly two and a half points. Not just slower progress than its peers, but real negative social progress. ClearBlue Water has also opened up between the US and the G7 peers. In 1990, US social progress was on a par with Germany. In 2011, it was 2.9 places lower. Now it's 6.21 places lower. Even countries that were just scuttling out from under communism in 1990 and had to go through tough economic transitions like Poland, the Czech Republic, and Estonia are all now ahead of the United States. We can break this down further by issue area. This spider chart compares US performance across the 12 components of the Social Progress Index in 2011 and 2025. This shows that the biggest deterioration of life for Americans has been in liberty, rights, freedom, inclusiveness, and advanced education. But the life measures have also suffered as well. Housing and safety have got worse. So too have the pursuit of happiness measures. Scores on education and health have also deteriorated since 2011. Let's look at those in a bit more detail in reverse order, starting with the pursuit of happiness. What we can see here is that the US score on health is stagnant for the first 10 years and then drops in 2021. Now this is clearly the impact and aftermath of COVID. But remember, most countries have seen rising scores on health, whereas the US is stagnant. On education, K through 12 education, we see a slow slide until 2022 and then a slight recovery. Let's hope that sustained, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it. So what I think this is telling us that there are chronic problems of the health and education systems in the US that are holding America back and they're not getting better. Second, life and the decline in scores on housing and safety. Housing's a simple one. It's the cost of housing, which has become increasingly unaffordable on an accelerating basis. It's a problem for the US and for many other rich countries. The sliding score on safety, however, is more of an American problem. It's about a lack of improvement on transportation safety, which is a very fixable problem, if there's a political will. It's about more violent crime, particularly domestic violence, and rising fear of walking alone. Third and finally, let's look at the broad-based decline in liberty. The big change here is in rights, which start to slide after 2021. The same is true for advanced education because of declining academic freedom. Inclusiveness and freedom of choice show smaller, steady declines since 2011. Liberty overall has declined in America since 2011. All this shows us is that a lot of the partisan finger pointing misses the point. Across red and blue administrations, America has moved away from the dream, the promise of the Founding Fathers, because of her chronic inability to tackle these failings. Can America bounce back? As each year passes, the US is hitting a new low on delivering on the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Measured through the Social Progress Index, the US ranks 32nd in the world. What are the chances of turning this around? Well, of course, you might ask before we get there, you know, does this matter at all if America is so successful economically? To be honest, I think that question is actually ill-posed. The semi-quincentennial is a reminder that the United States is not, was not built to achieve higher GDP per capita. It's their try to achieve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To succeed economically and to fail on these goals looks like a failure against the Founding Fathers' vision, as far as I'm concerned. Even taking the question on its own terms, we need to ask what America's failings on social progress mean for its future economic prospects. Our lead academic advisor on the Social Progress Index, Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School, pioneered the study of economic competitiveness. And he was adamant that economic success is built on strong social foundations. And he saw America's struggles for social progress as a threat to the US economy. You can't deny the entrepreneurial dynamism of the US and the demise of the US as a leading economic power have been predicted before. But are you really sure the declining social progress won't undermine wealth creation? So, what can the US do to turn this around? What are the chances of the US turning it around? Now that question is actually hard to answer because there are no analogous cases of wealthy countries experiencing such an extended period of social progress, stagnation and decline. The fact that no one's been there before is not a good sign. And also size doesn't help. Smaller countries definitely find it easier to achieve high levels or big improvements of social progress. Also, the federal system of government makes change at scale hard. The US, you could say, is a super tanker with a very spongy rudder. And the list of challenges is daunting. If America wants to tackle its crisis in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it really needs to address five areas of weakness, five really big areas. First of all, safety. Safety and security is the foundation of a successful society. America is failing across the piece from violence to road safety. Second, education. The school system is not competitive. It needs an overhaul if it's going to hit the standards required to be on a par with America's competitors. Health. This is an area where there's something fundamentally wrong given the cost and the outcomes. Love it or loath it, Obamacare seems to have only scratched the surface of problems that run much, much deeper. It's going to take a huge effort to turn this around. Fourth, housing. It's a problem the US shares a lot of rich countries. The cost of housing is crushing people. Now some countries do seem to have solved this problem. America needs to be one of them. And number five, rights. From the freedom of the press to freedom of academia to freedom of assembly, the US is on a negative path. Other countries are too. But if the US is the home of liberty, it really needs to turn this one around. We don't know the future. We don't know whether America can turn the situation around. The question that we should all be asking is, are your electoral candidates offering solutions to these problems? I hope so. I hope we can come back at the next big anniversary and celebrate America achieving an A grade on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thank you for watching. Am I too harsh or was I too lenient? Please do let us know. The data is all there on our website, available for your inspection. Take a look, and please, of course, do like and subscribe. Goodbye.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

If you want to learn more about going beyond GDP, Social Progress Imperative has the tools to help you. Our flagship Global Social Progress Index covers 170 countries with data going back to 2011. Through 57 different indicators, the Global Social Progress Index gives you a rigorous and comprehensive assessment of how countries are performing on real quality of life. For information on all of these tools, go to our website at socialprogress.org.