The Social Progress of Nations Revisited

"Adequacy of social provision" refers to the changing capacity of governments to provide for the basic social, material, and other needs of the people living within their borders, e.g., for food, clothing, shelter, and access to at least basic health, education, and social services (Estes 1988: pp. 199–209; Estes and Morgan 1976).

Nations characterized by higher level of cultural homogeneity can attain higher levels of social development and quality of life more rapidly than are nations characterized by higher levels of cultural heterogeneity (Binns and Dixon 2012; CIA 2018; Estes 1990; Rowntree and Lewis 2017). This driver of the pace of change in national well-being over time, however, should not be viewed negatively given the enormous richness that cultural diversity adds to the distinctiveness and social richness of countries.

Because of their length of an already long paper, I, with my colleagues at the Management Institute of Quality of Life Studies (MIQOLS), are creating a richly embellished website that focuses just on the content of this paper. The website addresses all the methodological issues identified above and does so in considerable detail. The site also reports 50-year data trends at the national, regional, and international levels of analysis that can be disaggregated reaggregated using the reader’s own system of statistical weights. Many calculators appear on the website to make the task easy for readers. The author believes other content related to these issues also will be easily identifiable on the website. I think you will be very pleased by the design and inclusiveness of the many measurement tools that make up the many analytical tools that make up the website. See the following working page on the website as illustrative of the overall richness of the larger website. The page reports composite and subindex scores for all 162 countries included in the analysis for each 10-year period studied. We have used color coding to distinguish between different clusters of nations. The website will provide lengthy discussions of the methodology used to identify the four factors as well as each of the WISP’s 10 subindexes. The first of the many detailed tables that will part of this site can be found at: http://​www.​miqols.​org/​toolbox2/​isp/​table-3.​html. The major site, however, will be located as part of the TOOLBOX tab of MIQOLS opening website: http://​www.​miqols.​org/​toolbox/​.

Unfortunately, the United States is not among the group of most socially developed countries. This unfortunate reality results from the country’s wide spread poverty (1:5 children are officially classified as poor), the country’s very high crime and violence rates—especially that associated with gun violence, the high rates of legal incarceration and, (USDOJ 2018) and, using the WISP’s rich bank of social indicators, lower year of average life expectancy combined with high rates of infant, child, and maternal mortality relative to other socially advanced nations (USDHHS 2018). The country’s social safety net has very large holes in it including high levels of income insecurity among the nation’s aged (USNIA 2018). As a nation, these realities sadden the study’s author who has spent many years in attempting to close these gaps that place the US at nearly the bottom of economically advanced nations where the wealth gap is extraordinary great and obvious to anyone who is willing to see it (USIRS 2018).

(*) indicate countries officially designated by the United Nations as “least developed countries” (LDCs), many of which are either landlocked or ocean-locked nations with a very limited array of products for sale on international markets (UN 2017). Rounding of decimals to whole numbers account for some countries being assigned a whole number score on the WISP18.

The 20 members of the G-20 are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and the multi-state European Union.