Academic details the end of the American dream

Updated: 2012-07-26 11:21

By Ariel Tung in New York (China Daily)

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Academic details the end of the American dream

Even before Americans were hit with news of last week's deadly shootings at a Colorado movie theater, a New York author was asking if the litany of previous gun-related crimes in the United States could have been avoided.

The US homicide rate is unusually high for a wealthy country, said Howard Friedman, who besides writing is a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs as well as a statistician and health economist for the United Nations.

In his new book, The Measure of a Nation: How to Regain America's Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing, Friedman attempts to correlate the presence of guns and personal safety. He claims 41 percent of gun-related homicides wouldn't have occurred under the same circumstances if guns hadn't been present.

"It is fair to say that the US has the most liberal gun-ownership laws of any of the wealthy countries compared in my book," Friedman said in an interview.

In his book, Friedman systematically compares the United States with 13 other wealthy countries in five key areas: health, education, safety, democracy and equality,

The countries he used for comparison all had per-capita gross domestic product exceeding $20,000 a year and populations of more than 10 million. They were Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Republic of Korea, Spain and the United Kingdom.

For example, Japan, where personal use of guns is prohibited, has the lowest homicide rate among the developed nations surveyed in Friedman's book. The UK, which banned private gun ownership in 1997, also has one of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the world.

Not only is the US not as safe as other rich countries, it's lagging in other areas.

According to Friedman, the "American dream" - consisting of the traditional ideals of freedom, equality and upward social mobility achieved through hard work - turns out to be a myth.

The biggest challenge facing the US is its rising income inequality, said Friedman. Over the past 30 years, the gap between rich and poor has widened. The top 1 percent of US citizens saw their incomes grow by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007, according to the Congressional Budget Office. During the same period, the bottom fifth of the populace experienced income growth of only 18 percent.

"The amount of support poor people get in the US is much less than in any other country in terms of social benefits. There's not much of a safety net to help you out. On the other hand, if you do well, you can do very well in the US," the author said.

What concerns Friedman even more is the "inequality of opportunity". The US has limited socioeconomic upward mobility - the movement into higher income levels - compared with its wealthy peers. Canada, for instance, has nearly twice the level of upward socioeconomic mobility as the US.

"In America, if your parents were poor, you are more likely to be poor compared to other countries. The top student from a poor neighborhood has roughly the same chance of graduating from college as the worst student from a wealthy neighborhood," Friedman said.

From his findings, Friedman was most surprised by the "disconnect between America's self-perception of excellence and the reality of the objective data".

"Few politicians are willing to acknowledge the fact that Americans spend on average nearly two to four times more on health care than any other wealthy country, yet [they] have lower life expectancies," he said.

"Many Americans are confident that the US education system is one of the best in the world, but again the data indicate that this perception is not supported by facts."

Friedman said that if the US were a corporation, it would today be the equivalent of IBM in the early 1990s. The computer giant had been a technology leader for decades but lost its place in the 1980s after outsourcing key elements to competitors.

Among the fact-based assertions in Friedman's book: In 1960, the US had the 12th-lowest infant mortality rate in the world, but it had sunk to 34th by 2008; the US population used to have the highest rate of college education and now barely makes it into the top 15.

While most of the information he used is easily obtained from public sources, Friedman found there wasn't a lot of research that "systematically identifies where the US is succeeding or lacking or what it can learn from others".

On the other hand, a report on the US from Beijing "echoes many of my criticisms", the Columbia professor said. On May 25, China issued a report on US human rights practices, following a 2011 report by the US State Department on human rights in China and the rest of the world. Washington has been releasing human rights reports for 40 years.

Beijing's own report, now in its 13th year, criticized the US for its wealth gap, high incarceration and homicide rates, inadequate medical insurance coverage and cuts to education budgets, among other things. According to the report, in the past 20 years, the incomes of 90 percent of Americans have stagnated while those of the richest 1 percent have risen 33 percent. The US, the report added, has the largest prison population in the world per capita and the highest rate of incarceration, with one of every 132 Americans behind bars.

Friedman's book notes that US incarceration and homicide rates are 10 times higher than Japan's.

"There's an interesting financial incentive. Not all prisons are run by the state. Those privately run prisons make profits when people are put into jail, so they support laws that improve incarceration," he said.

Some pundits have called The Measure of a Nation a wake-up call and a must-read for Americans.

"Friedman presents a thorough, unbiased analysis of how America compares with the rest of the developed world in health, safety, education, democracy and other quality-of-life indicators," political writer and columnist Steven Hill wrote in an Amazon.com review.

atung@chinadailyusa.com

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