Once #1, Now #42!

A very significant report has been released and reviewed in a variety of places, but I haven't seen or heard reference to it in the mainstream American media (not counting an abstract in the oh, so popular (Ha!) The New Yorker. (You know, the magazine that featured a cover cartoon of Baraka Obama as a jihadist.) If you want to know where we stand, for real, not in wishful thinking, follow the links below:
About the Report
The Measure of America: American Human Development Report
2008-2009, produced by the American Human Development Project, is modeled on the United Nations Development Programme’s global Human Development Report, which has provided authoritative analysis and a ranked index for countries around the world for almost two decades. The Measure of America, published by Columbia University Press and The Social Science Research Council, is the first time the human development approach has been applied in the United States or any other industrialized nation. The report features forewords by Nobel laureate and Harvard Professor Amartya Sen and California venture capitalist William H. Draper III.
Using official government statistics and robust peer-reviewed analysis, the American Human Development Report presents human development rankings for U.S. states, congressional districts, and ethnic groups. It reveals where America is today and sets a benchmark for monitoring progress tomorrow. Unlike the many existing measurements used to assess health, education, or income alone, the American Human Development Index (HD Index) combines these factors into one easy-to-understand measurement. This more comprehensive measure allows for a better understanding of the opportunities open to different groups of Americans.

http://www.measureofamerica.org/2008-2009-report/about/
Take a test using the Well-O-Meter to see how you personally rank among your American peers: http://measureofamerica.org/rewrite.php?well-o-meter/

International Comparisons

• A poor child born in Germany, France, Canada, or one of the Nordic countries has a better chance to join the middle class in adulthood than an American child born into similar circumstances.
• The U.S. ranks second among 177 countries in per-capita income but 12th on human development, according to the global Human Development Index, published annually by the United Nations Development Programme. Each of the 11 countries ahead of the U.S. has a lower per-capita income than the U.S., but all perform better on the health and knowledge dimensions.
• The U.S. infant mortality rate is on par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland.
• If the U.S. infant mortality rate were equal to that of first-ranked Sweden, twenty-one thousand more American babies would have lived to celebrate their first birthdays in 2005.
• In 98 countries, new mothers have 14 or more weeks of paid maternity leave. The U.S. has no federally mandated paid maternity leave.
• The United States ranks second in the world in per-capita income (behind Luxembourg), but thirty-fourth in survival of infants to age one.
• The U.S. ranks forty-second in global life expectancy and first among the world’s twenty-five richest countries in the percentage of children living in poverty.
• In the 2006 OECD international assessment of fifteen-year-olds, in math, the U.S. came in twenty-fourth, and in science, the U.S. came in seventeenth.
• The U.S. incarceration rate is five-to-nine times greater than that of our peer nations.

The Guardian covered the report here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/17/internationalaidanddevelopment.usa
Statistics and graphs were generated by a company called Humantific. Here’s something from their homepage:
At Humantific we apply hybrid methods from the emerging/converging fields of design thinking, innovation acceleration and transformation science. Working with this hybrid toolbox we help our clients construct new value by creating pathways through fuzzy strategic complexity of all kinds, by communicating complex ideas, and by building more human-centered organizations that maximize collective brainpower and are adaptable to continuous change.
Regardless of whether we are working on an InsightsLab, StrategyLab, UnderstandingLab, or LearningLab project, it is SenseMaking that is the connecting thread through all of our ChangeMaking work.
See more here: http://www.humantific.com/

Racial Bias in Drug War Verified

Reports Find Racial Gap in Drug Arrests
By ERIK ECKHOLM, Published: May 6, 2008
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates
Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.
But they note that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the war on drugs, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks.
In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to 1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980.
More than four in five of the arrests were for possession of banned substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. [my bold] Four in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to the latest F.B.I. data.
Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: they are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, [my bold] according to the Human Rights Watch report.
[...] Some crime experts say that the disparities exist for sound reasons. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, said it made sense for police to focus more on fighting visible drug dealing in low-income urban areas, largely involving members of minorities, than on hidden use in suburban homes, more often by whites, because the urban street trade is more associated with violence and other crimes and impairs the quality of life.
“The disparities reflect policing decisions to use drug laws to try and reduce violence and to respond to the demand by law-abiding residents in poor neighborhoods to clean up the drug trade,” Ms. Mac Donald said. [What about the violence created in homes where mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters are incarcerated for possession, not making a profit over someone else's misery!? Ms. Mac Donald doesn’t care about the quiet violence of families being torn apart! She is a racist and a class criminal!]
[...] Police in a few cities including Denver, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have said they are spending fewer resources on arrests for lower-lever offenses like marijuana possession.
In December, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the federal sentencing guidelines for convictions involving crack cocaine, which is more often used by blacks, somewhat reducing the length of sentences compared with those for convictions involving powder cocaine. But mandatory and longer sentences for crack violations remain embedded in federal and state laws.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/06disparities.html?_r=1&oref=slogin