Our Unequal World, as Seen from Down Under

A Too Much book review: October 18, 2004

Rodney Tiffen and Ross Gittins, How Australia Compares.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Our modern world, travelers today frequently complain, is becoming more and more alike. Go anywhere in the developed world, the lament goes, and you'll see a McDonald's.

Are we indeed living the same life no matter where in the developed world we live? Or do stark differences still separate our daily lives from one nation to another?

Want an answer? You can find one in a remarkable new factbook from two distinguished Australian analysts, Rodney Tiffen and Ross Gittins, the first a political scientist and the second the economics editor of one of Australia's most prominent daily newspapers.

In their new book, How Australia Compares, Tiffen and Gittins rate their native land against its peer nations — the 17 other stable democracies of the developed world — on over 200 different measures of social well-being, everything from the number of patients undergoing dialysis per 100,000 population to rates of child poverty.

The authors draw no grand conclusions from the clearly presented date tables that emerge from their comparisons. We can. On every measure of basic social decency, their data make plain, developed nations that tend toward greater equality are outdoing their more unequal peer nations.

Gaps in income and wealth, the Tiffen and Gittins data almost shout out, are driving which societies in the developed world are moving forward and which societies are not.

Tiffen and Gittins count 18 significant and stable democracies in the world today: Australia, the United States, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Ireland, and New Zealand.

Of all these nations, their data show, we here in the United States have by far the greatest capacity to create a good society. Our per capita income, at over $35,000, is nearly $9,000 higher than the developed world’s per capita average — and over $5,000 higher than the per capita income in Norway, the developed world’s second most affluent nation.

No other nation has the wherewithal the United States has to do good for its people. Yet, on measure after measure of basic decency, we lag the rest of the developed world. We lag badly.

Consider child poverty. Of the 18 most significant developed nations in the world, we in the United States rank last in overcoming child poverty.

Consider hours of work. The average families with the least leisure time in the developed world are American families.

Consider probability of surviving to age 60. We rank 18th, worst in the developed world.

Consider infant mortality. We rank last in the developed world. Consider maternal mortality. We rank last. Consider level of unemployment benefits. We rank last. Spending for job training, the same story. We rank last.

We don’t, of course, rank last on every measure. On teacher salaries as a percent of GDP, for instance, we rank 17th in the developed world, next to last.

And we do, to be sure, rank first on some measures. We rank first in homicides. We rank first in incarceration rates. And we rank, above all, first in inequality. No nation has a greater gap between top and bottom than we do. In no developed nation has wealth and income concentrated as intensely as ours.

This inequality, of course, could have nothing to do with our woefully poor performance on basic measures of social decency.

Instead of blaming inequality, we could blame television for the state we’re in. We watch more TV than anybody else, ten hours a week on average more than Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians

Or we could blame the devil. Over 70 percent of Americans say they believe in the devil, by far the highest proportion in the developed world. Maybe the devil makes us so uncaring as a society.

But we would be wise, the numbers in How Australia Compares suggest, to focus our attention instead on inequality. Our United States has become less good, less caring, less compassionate, less healthy as we have become more unequal.

Tiffen and Gittins set out to tell their fellow Australians a thing or two about their world. It's we Americans who should be listening.