The United Nations’ latest annual ranking of nations by “sustainable development goals” will come as a shock to many Americans. Not that we’re not “Number One,” we’re not even close. The first four countries are Scandinavian democracies. The United States ranks forty-first, just below Cuba (that is, below our Communist neighbor). The countries that beat us include Estonia, Croatia, Slovak Republic, Romania and Serbia.
The purpose of the report is to measure countries’ progress, or development, towards a civilized and sustainable future.
Every classification contains some element of subjectivity. But the seventeen “sustainable development goals” (SDGs) developed by economist Jeffrey Sachs and his team are well chosen. These include the absence of poverty and hunger, good health and education, gender equality, clean air and water, and reduced inequality.
The purpose of the report is to measure countries’ progress, or development, towards a civilized and sustainable future. As historian Kathleen Frydl points out, “Under this methodology … the United States ranks between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are considered developing countries.” Frydl’s essay was widely circulated under the headline, “US becoming ‘developing country’ on global rankings measuring democracy, inequality.”
According to Frydl, the picture of the United States looks like that of a developing country. But how, exactly, does a country that was once “developed” become “developing”? The phrase “developing country” implies that there are countries that have achieved development, and countries that are on their way. It leaves no room for the possibility that a nation, once developed, can develop itself. It’s like saying that a “growing child” can become “ungrown.” And yet, this is exactly what is happening to the United States.
The language of “developed” and “developing” countries carries with it the idea that the countries of Western Europe and North America have reached a tipping point in the 20th century, one that nations others aspire to it and are on the way to achieve it. It is the language of post-colonialism (suggesting that the United States is now colonizing itself). The words are heavily loaded with assumptions about globalization, capitalism, and liberal democracy. Among them is the idea that these forces bring with them stability, the kind of benign stasis that Francis Fukuyama once called “the end of history”.
Fukuyama has since renounced that idea, and understandably so. The declining status of the United States undermines the historical assumptions about progress that have guided political and financial elites for decades. Countries like the United States and the United Kingdom look less and less like the final state of history and more and more like declining world powers, like so many that have gone before them.
Perhaps for this reason, the public debate moved away from the almost utopian ideals of Western development and back towards the idea that history is a cyclical process in which empires rise and fall. Anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber find positive qualities in ‘primitive’ societies. Journalists such as Chris Hedges adopt the decline of the American empire as a major theme. In To Govern the Globe, historian Alfred McCoy predicts the decline of American power and speculates that imperial nation-states may soon cease to exist altogether.
The historian Marc Bloch, quoted in Harvey Kaye’s book on British Marxist historians, sounds prophetic when he writes that history is “the science of eternal change.”
Where does this leave the people of the United States? Other metrics and reports may not put the United States below Cuba or Serbia, but most major metrics seem to point one way: down. Life expectancy is decreasing. Economic inequality is increasing. Other measurements are flat at best.
Progress is not like rain. It does not fall, as the Bible says about the rain, “it falls on the just and the unjust alike.” Progress, real progress, is made by people working together for the common good. If they don’t work together it slows down, or stops, or reverses. The language of “development” is outdated. We need a new language of cooperation, democracy and justice. And we need it now, before it’s too late, before the forces of climate change sweep us on the tides of eternal change.
