United StatesUnited States
Rank: 2nd best
Strengths (15)
Score:
100/100 Food consumption as a share of household expenditure
100/100 Nutritional standards
100/100 Presence of food safety net programmes
86/100 Food Affordability
83/100 Food Availability
87/100 Food Quality and safety
Human Development Index: 92
Intensity of food deprivation(lower is better): 8 kcal/person/day
Prevalence of undernourishment(lower is better): 5%
Challenges (0)
ChinaChina
Rank: 45
Scores:
64/100 Food Affordability
61/100 Food Availability
71/100 Food Quality and safety
Human Development Index: 73
Intensity of food deprivation(lower is better): 74 kcal/person/day
Prevalence of undernourishment(lower is better): 9%
IndiaIndia
Rank: 74
Scores:
41/100 Food Affordability
56/100 Food Availability
49/100 Food Quality and safety
Human Development Index: 62
Intensity of food deprivation(lower is better): 109 kcal/person/day
Prevalence of undernourishment(lower is better): 15%
ZambiaZambia
Rank: 104
Scores:
19/100 Food Affordability
47/100 Food Availability
27/100 Food Quality and safety
Human Development Index: 58
Intensity of food deprivation(lower is better): 405 kcal/person/day
Prevalence of undernourishment(lower is better): 48%
List of countries by wealth per adultMedian total wealth per adult by country
- Code: Select all
Japan $123,724
France $119,720
S Korea $67,934
US $55,867
Germany $47,091
Hungary $30,111
UAE $19,712
Poland $10,302
China $6,689
India $4,295
Zambia $298
2018 Fragile States indexThe Fragile States Index (FSI) is an annual ranking of 178 countries based on the different pressures they face that impact their levels of fragility. The Index is based on The Fund for Peace’s proprietary Conflict Assessment System Tool (CAST) analytical approach. Based on comprehensive social science methodology, three primary streams of data — quantitative, qualitative, and expert validation — are triangulated and subjected to critical review to obtain final scores for the FSI. Millions of documents are analyzed every year, and by applying highly specialized search parameters, scores are apportioned for every country based on twelve key political, social and economic indicators and over 100 sub-indicators that are the result of years of expert social science research. For an explanation of the various indicators and their icons, please refer to page 30.
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It certainly felt like a tumultuous year in 2017. As the wars in Syria and Yemen ratcheted up in intensity, Qatar was suddenly politically, economically and physically isolated from its neighbors, Catalonia moved forward on its attempts to separate from Spain, Venezuela fell further into chaos, the United Kingdom continued to struggle with the terms of its exit from the European Union, and the United States (in addition to being plagued by a series of natural disasters) moved from one political crisis to the next. Yet despite all of these concerns, the clear message of the Fragile States Index (FSI) in 2018 was that, on the whole, most countries around the world continue to show signs of steady improvement, and many – particularly Mexico – demonstrate resiliency in the face of enormous pressure.
This is why infrastructure is so expensiveU.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency -- inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the problems choking U.S. construction, reformers are going to have to go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.
Market Failure Looks Like the Culprit in Rising CostsTwo years ago, I suggested that the U.S. economy is riddled with strangely high costs in key sectors of the economy. Now, more and more people seem to be zeroing in on this problem. Blogger Scott Alexander has a long, excellent rundown of high costs in five areas -- K-12 education, college, health care, infrastructure and housing. Americans pay much more for a university education than do people in Europe or East Asia. They pay about twice as much for health care, even though the quality is about the same. And the U.S. pays about twice as much for infrastructure, again without any clear difference in quality.
I’d add one more sector: finance. Retirement saving in the U.S. is dominated by managers who charge fees that seem small, but end up taking a huge chunk of people’s lifetime savings. Real estate agents typically get commissions equal to about 5.5 percent of the sale price of a home, compared to smaller commissions in most other rich countries.
So if cost disease and government can at most be only part of the story, what’s going on? One possibility Alexander raises is that “markets might just not work.” In other words, there might be large market failures going on.
The health-care market naturally has a lot of adverse selection -- people with poor health are more inclined to buy insurance. That means insurance companies, knowing its customers tend to be those with poorer health, charge higher prices. Also, hospitals could be local monopolies. And college education could be costly in part because of asymmetric information -- if Americans tend to vary more than people in other countries with respect to work ethic and natural ability, they might have to spend more on college to prove themselves. This is known as signaling.
When high costs are due to market failures, interventionist government can be the solution instead of the problem -- provided the intervention is done right. So the more active governments of countries like Europe and Japan might be successfully holding down costs that would otherwise balloon to inefficient levels.
But there’s one more possibility -- one that gets taught in few economics classes. There is almost certainly some level of pure trickery in the economy -- people paying more than they should, because they don’t have the time or knowledge to look for better prices, or because they trust people they shouldn’t trust.
This is the thesis of the book “Phishing for Phools,” by Nobel-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. The authors advance the disturbing thesis that sellers will continually look for ways to dupe customers into paying more than they should, and that these efforts will always be partially successful. In Akerlof and Shiller’s reckoning, markets don’t just sometimes fail -- they are inherently subject to both deceit and mistakes.
That could explain a number of unsettling empirical results in the economics literature. For example, transparency reduces prices substantially in health-care equipment markets. More complex and opaque mortgage-backed securities failed at higher rates in the financial crisis. In these and other cases, buyers paid too much because they didn’t know what they were buying. Whether that’s due to trickery, or to the difficulty of gathering accurate information, it’s not good -- in an efficient economy, everyone will know what they’re buying.
So it’s possible that many of those anomalously high U.S. costs are due to the natural informational problems of markets. If that’s the case, the government should mandate better information -- more transparent bidding for construction projects, more price disclosure in health care and so on. The American people, complacent because of long years of prosperity, may need help in learning how to be savvy bargain hunters.
kublikhan wrote:I think one of the biggest problems is wealth inequality. The US wealth inequality is on the level you would normally find in a banana republic. The Healthcare & education systems too need an overhaul IMHO. Too much money spent for too little result. There are a plethora of examples of better systems to look at in other countries. Put the nation's infrastructure on the list too.
It seems to me that in the above areas money is not flowing to the correct places. Poor systems in place, plain old greed, etc.This is why infrastructure is so expensiveU.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency -- inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the problems choking U.S. construction, reformers are going to have to go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.Market Failure Looks Like the Culprit in Rising CostsTwo years ago, I suggested that the U.S. economy is riddled with strangely high costs in key sectors of the economy. Now, more and more people seem to be zeroing in on this problem. Blogger Scott Alexander has a long, excellent rundown of high costs in five areas -- K-12 education, college, health care, infrastructure and housing. Americans pay much more for a university education than do people in Europe or East Asia. They pay about twice as much for health care, even though the quality is about the same. And the U.S. pays about twice as much for infrastructure, again without any clear difference in quality.
I’d add one more sector: finance. Retirement saving in the U.S. is dominated by managers who charge fees that seem small, but end up taking a huge chunk of people’s lifetime savings. Real estate agents typically get commissions equal to about 5.5 percent of the sale price of a home, compared to smaller commissions in most other rich countries.
So if cost disease and government can at most be only part of the story, what’s going on? One possibility Alexander raises is that “markets might just not work.” In other words, there might be large market failures going on.
The health-care market naturally has a lot of adverse selection -- people with poor health are more inclined to buy insurance. That means insurance companies, knowing its customers tend to be those with poorer health, charge higher prices. Also, hospitals could be local monopolies. And college education could be costly in part because of asymmetric information -- if Americans tend to vary more than people in other countries with respect to work ethic and natural ability, they might have to spend more on college to prove themselves. This is known as signaling.
When high costs are due to market failures, interventionist government can be the solution instead of the problem -- provided the intervention is done right. So the more active governments of countries like Europe and Japan might be successfully holding down costs that would otherwise balloon to inefficient levels.
But there’s one more possibility -- one that gets taught in few economics classes. There is almost certainly some level of pure trickery in the economy -- people paying more than they should, because they don’t have the time or knowledge to look for better prices, or because they trust people they shouldn’t trust.
This is the thesis of the book “Phishing for Phools,” by Nobel-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. The authors advance the disturbing thesis that sellers will continually look for ways to dupe customers into paying more than they should, and that these efforts will always be partially successful. In Akerlof and Shiller’s reckoning, markets don’t just sometimes fail -- they are inherently subject to both deceit and mistakes.
That could explain a number of unsettling empirical results in the economics literature. For example, transparency reduces prices substantially in health-care equipment markets. More complex and opaque mortgage-backed securities failed at higher rates in the financial crisis. In these and other cases, buyers paid too much because they didn’t know what they were buying. Whether that’s due to trickery, or to the difficulty of gathering accurate information, it’s not good -- in an efficient economy, everyone will know what they’re buying.
So it’s possible that many of those anomalously high U.S. costs are due to the natural informational problems of markets. If that’s the case, the government should mandate better information -- more transparent bidding for construction projects, more price disclosure in health care and so on. The American people, complacent because of long years of prosperity, may need help in learning how to be savvy bargain hunters.
onlooker wrote:Beyond the diminishing returns on complexity presented by Tainter in his work, we have the problem of "corruption-is-both-a-symptom-of-the-basic-structures-of-capitalism-and-a-technology-that-supports-them"
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2016/0 ... orts-them/
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The Fragile States Index (FSI; formerly the Failed States Index) is an annual report published by the United States think tank the Fund for Peace and the American magazine Foreign Policy since 2005. The list aims to assess states' vulnerability to conflict or collapse, ranking all sovereign states with membership in the United Nations where there is enough data available for analysis.[1] Taiwan, the Palestinian Territories, Northern Cyprus, Kosovo and Western Sahara are not ranked, despite being recognised as sovereign by one or more other nations. Ranking is based on the sum of scores for 12 indicators (see below). Each indicator is scored on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being the lowest intensity (most stable) and 10 being the highest intensity (least stable), creating a scale spanning 0−120.[1]
marmico wrote:More word salad from onlooker. What a blathering bloviating blowhard!
Newfie wrote:marmico wrote:More word salad from onlooker. What a blathering bloviating blowhard!
And your contribution is? Frankly that post is a no content troll.
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