Abstract
The American Human Development Report is an application of the conceptual framework pioneered by Mahbub ul Haq, Amartya Sen, and others to look at human welfare more broadly than traditional measures of economic growth. It includes a Human Development Index, a composite measurement of well-being and opportunity comprised of health, education, and income indicators. Human development reports have now been adapted for over 160 regions around the world, where they have been embraced as critical benchmarks for human progress. But the American Human Development Report is the first to apply a human development index to an affluent-country context. Just as the global Human Development Index can help explain why two developing countries with identical Gross Domestic Product (GDP) can nevertheless fare so differently in more comprehensive metrics of quality of life, so too can an American Human Development Index illuminate the distribution of disparities and opportunities within a single developed country. This chapter looks specifically at applications of the human development framework to the states of Mississippi and Louisiana. In so doing, it uncovers that while certain population groups within these states thrive at the same level as the average of the top-ranked American state (Connecticut), other groups within these states lag decades behind. Recommendations for improving human developing rankings in these two Gulf States follow.
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Notes
- 1.
Because the two indices are constructed of different indicators, we distinguish the American Human Development Index by abbreviating it as the American HD Index, and use the common abbreviation HDI to refer to the United Nations Human Development Index.
- 2.
In this study, data were only presented for two of the five largest Census Bureau racial/ethnic categories – African Americans and whites – because these two groups together constitute nearly the entire population of Mississippi. The vast majority of county groups are between 97.2 and 100% African American and white in their racial makeup. The two county groups with the largest populations of people who are neither African American nor white have small populations of people with Vietnamese ancestry (in Harrison), Native Americans (in Neshoba-Scott), and people of Latino origin (in Harrison). The population of these groups is not of sufficient size to allow for a disaggregated well-being score within an acceptable margin of error on this index. A closer look at a broad range of well-being indicators for these populations of Mississippians would be a valuable area for future research.
- 3.
Even in those two counties, African Americans have unusually high life expectancies, which drive their HD Indices up, much higher than third-ranked Hinds County. Those values should be viewed with caution, since both counties experienced large inflows of African Americans in recent years. Even though we used 5-year pooled data in the estimation of life expectancies, in order to minimize the effects of migration on the estimates, African American life expectancy – and consequently the HD Indices as well – in DeSoto and Rankin counties are probably still overestimated.
- 4.
Nationwide, the greatest gaps are often found within major metropolitan areas.
- 5.
As with the Mississippi study, this study of Louisiana focused primarily on whites and African Americans. Though Louisiana is also home to Latinos, American Indians, Vietnamese Americans, and people of other ethnicities, insufficient data on these comparatively small populations make it impossible to calculate comparable, statistically reliable Index scores for them. As data collection, both at the state level and through the American Community Survey, continues to improve, the American Human Development Project will be able to more accurately reflect the well-being of these groups in the index.
References
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Burd-Sharps, S., Guyer, P.N., Lechterman, T., Lewis, K. (2011). The American Human Development Index: Results from Mississippi and Louisiana. In: Sirgy, M., Phillips, R., Rahtz, D. (eds) Community Quality-of-Life Indicators: Best Cases V. Community Quality-of-Life Indicators, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0535-7_6
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