Bryan Caplan points his readers towards the intra-US Human Development Index. This Human Development Index is a measure that gives equal weight to life expectancy, educational attainment/school enrollment and median earnings. Bryan Caplan’s critique of the very similar international version of the HDI is that it gives far too much weight to the educational measure and far too little weight to measures of GDP, which can only contribute a fixed amount to the scale. With this fixed scale, rich countries are unable to improve their HDI scores via getting richer, even though this would obviously improve the lives of the population. There are also good arguments against the absolute level of school enrollment being correlated to quality of life past a certain point. When looking at the international HDI Bryan Caplan concludes
“Scandinavia comes out on top according to the HDI because the HDI is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is.”
However, the breakdown of the USA HDI is rather interesting. For one thing, we see that Asians consistently outperform Whites, who outperform African Americans and Latinos. Both of these groups are generally ahead of Native Americans. The report gives a breakdown of how well each ethnicity is doing in each state.
For Asians: The highest index score is for Asians in New Hampshire, the lowest Asian score is for those in Louisiana.
Potential Reasons: New Hampshire is relatively wealthy, and yet is less likely to be a first destination for immigrants to the extent of other states such as California and New York. The high score of Asians here might be a measure of second generation Asian success when the averages aren’t brought down by new immigrants. The low score in Louisiana is probably because it is relatively poor and potentially more likely to be racist.
For Latinos: They score highest in New Jersey and the lowest in Alabama.
Potential Reasons: New Jersey has a relatively high amount of non-Mexican Hispanics as well as a large Hispanic population relative to the population, which may bring up the average score of Latinos in this state. In Alabama, already a relatively poor state from a per capita perspective, there is a particularly low ratio of Hispanics in the population and many of them are both young and Mexican, lowering their average score.
For African Americans: The highest score is in Maryland and the lowest score is in Louisiana. The African Americans with a job in Washington DC might be likely to be living in Maryland, which would raise the pay and educational attainment of the average population.
Native Americans: They score highest in California and lowest South Dakota.
Potential Reasons: South Dakota is not relatively wealthy or much of a tourist destination to begin with and the city of Deadwood legalized gambling, which competes with Indian casinos.
For Whites: The highest White score is for those in Washington D.C. while the score is lowest in West Virginia.
Potential Reasons: Washington D.C. has a large amount of government jobs which both pay more than private sector jobs and employ a large amount of people with humanities PhD’s, which are not highly valued outside of academia or governmental type agencies. This raises their median earnings score and their educational attainment score. Education is correlated to longevity, so this score is higher too, though educational attainment is the main outlier. The relatively large amount of colleges in D.C. should also help the scores. West Virginia has historically been the home to poor whites