The United States is underperforming its wealthy peers on core measures of well-being, according to data released June 26 by the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, a nonprofit that tracks how well countries meet their human rights commitments. The analysis, republished by United Press International, was conducted by Stephen Bagwell, assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Susan Randolph, associate professor emerita of economics at the University of Connecticut.
“We are scholars of human rights,” Bagwell and Randolph wrote. “The latest data our team has amassed shows that the U.S. is falling short compared with what it could achieve, given its US$32 trillion economy. This is not a one-year blip — the U.S. has been underperforming for the past 25 years.”
The HRMI scoring system evaluates how well a country provides for its people compared with other countries of similar wealth, using per capita gross domestic product as a measure of resources. A 100% score indicates a country is doing all it can with what it has; lower scores signal room for improvement. The researchers compared the U.S. against 37 other high-income, free-market countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Health. The U.S. scored about 80% on health outcomes — how well the country keeps people alive, reduces preventable disease, and ensures children are born healthy. Canada scored 90%, Japan 88%, Mexico 86%, Australia 93% and Iceland 97%. U.S. health scores rose from 79% in 2000 to 82% in 2012 — likely due to the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of insurance — then receded to 80% by 2023, driven primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors said they anticipate further declines because the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 11.8 million Americans would lose access to government-subsidized health insurance due to changes in the tax and spending package President Donald Trump signed into law in the summer of 2025, a figure projected to rise to 17 million by 2034.
Food. On the right to adequate nutrition, the U.S. achieved about 81% of its possible score, ranking 30th out of 37 OECD countries for which data are available. The food score fell slightly from 81.9% in 2015 — its peak in 2020 — to 81.1% in 2023. “This means that as the U.S. got wealthier, Americans got hungrier,” the authors wrote. They attributed the decline to persistent inflation, rising housing costs and changes to SNAP. Since September 2025, about 3.4 million people lost access to food assistance because of cuts in the 2025 legislative package, according to the analysis. In Arizona, SNAP enrollment fell by about half as of April 2026, with more than 400,000 people losing benefits since July 2025, ProPublica reported.
Work and income. The U.S. scored worst among OECD member countries on the right to dignified work and a fair income, achieving just 27% of its potential. The metric measures how many people earn at least half of a typical U.S. household income. On the ability to find a job, the U.S. scored about 75%, ranking 10th alongside the Netherlands and Iceland. But the income component dragged the overall score down. After accounting for the country’s growth in wealth, the U.S. score fell from about 62% in 2000 to 51% today. Bagwell and Randolph said that if the U.S. adopted policies such as increasing the federal minimum wage, 46 million people could rise above the fair-pay line, and about 5 million more would escape extreme poverty (surviving on less than $4.20 per day).
Education. The U.S. scored 76% on the right to education, ranking 20th among 38 OECD countries. The gap between access (90.7%) and quality (61.3%) was the largest among the five areas measured. The U.S. trails Japan and the United Kingdom but leads some peers including Canada and Norway, according to the data.
Bagwell and Randolph concluded that the U.S. shortfalls are not a matter of insufficient national wealth. “The reason isn’t that the country can’t afford to do better; we’ve found it’s because the U.S. doesn’t turn that wealth into opportunities for everyone to have a decent life,” they wrote. “Promoting the general welfare was written into the country’s founding promise — 250 years later, our data shows how far there still is to go.”