Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Unhappiness
Nicholas Kristoff, The New York Times, January 2026
We Americans like to boast, “We’re No. 1,” and we certainly are in our military capacity to invade other countries and abduct odious foreign leaders.
But in the well-being of ordinary citizens? A careful study released Wednesday and based on a measure called the Social Progress Index suggests that in terms of quality of life, the United States ranks 32nd out of 171 countries, behind Poland, Lithuania and Cyprus.
More alarming, the United States has fallen steadily in the rankings over the years, under Republican and Democratic presidents alike — and now seems poised to fall further because of cuts in health care and other services by President Trump.
The Social Progress Index was introduced in the 2010s by a high-powered team of scholars and experts. The United States ranked 18th in 2011, and while that was troubling, we were still ahead of France, Italy and Spain. Now they outrank America.
The Social Progress Index has 12 components, and since 2011 the United States has fallen in the rankings in all of them, said Michael Green, the chief executive of the group that publishes the index each year.
“The quality of life in America is not just worse than in a handful of small Scandinavian countries but also worse than in all of America’s G7 competitors,” Green told me. “We’ve slipped behind former Communist countries like Slovenia, Lithuania and Estonia and behind other relatively new democracies like South Korea.”
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“The U.S. won the Cold War by being an economic superpower and a social progress superpower,” Green added. “Over the last 30 years, America has simply let go, in terms of social progress.”
The Social Progress Index is just one set of metrics, of course, and one could quibble about this or that score. But it is a useful exercise to employ objective data to weigh quality of life across countries:
In safety, the United States ranks 99th, the index finds, behind Pakistan and Nicaragua.
In K-12 education, America is 47th, behind Vietnam and Kazakhstan.
In health, we rank 45th, behind Argentina and Panama.
Most other attempts to assess nations by well-being also show the United States struggling in recent years. The recent World Happiness Report, ranking countries based on polling about happiness and how people evaluate their lives, has the United States at 24th — down from 15th a decade earlier. The Atlantic Council’s freedom index ranks America No. 22 and in decline, and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index puts the United States at No. 28.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with its celebration of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In a sense, the Social Progress Index and these other assessment tools evaluate how well we’re doing by our own metrics.
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The United States does a fine job generating economic growth, but it lags at translating that G.D.P. growth into the things we most care about.
For a contrast, consider Latvia. It has less than half the per capita G.D.P. of the United States, but it enjoys similar scores on the Social Progress Index.
The index is not, of course, definitive. I think the United States is more honest than some other countries in data collection (in areas such as neonatal mortality), and I worry that Western Europe, for all its social gains, has an economic model that suppresses innovation and long-term growth.
Yet the index also captures something real. It explains some of the frustration and discontent that helped elect Donald Trump on the right and Zohran Mamdani on the left. When Americans say that the system is not working for them, these rankings illuminate why they feel such frustration.
As I suggested, things may get worse. As I wrote recently, Trump’s cuts in health care may cost 51,000 lives annually and result in 101,000 cases of untreated addiction annually, along with 138,000 cases of untreated diabetes.
Liberals may be tempted to focus on Trump’s shortcomings. But there is something larger going on here as well: Since about 1970, the United States has been lagging peer countries in some quality-of-life measures.
“It’s not about Trump,” Green said. “Obama and Biden did little to reverse the decline, nor did the Bushes or Clinton. It’s a multipresident, bipartisan, long, slow car crash. Yet voters seem to have been anesthetized by a rising stock market and economic growth, until in recent years it’s become clear to people that their living standards have stagnated — and that’s why they’ve turned to the populist promise of MAGA and Trump.”
He added, “We have to think about Trump as the consequence rather than the cause of America’s progress decline.”
So what’s the solution?
Part of the answer may be investments in human capital — in children, education and lifting skill levels. That’s everything from early childhood initiatives to vocational training, from drug treatment to community colleges.
Our relentless decline in our international standing should be an alarm bell in the night. We are not the nation we think we are, and we should shake off this complacency unless we’re comfortable with our patriotic boast becoming, “We’re No. 32!”
