The plainest truth is that, as a country, we have let conditions of life in America deteriorate across a broad front and are headed straight to a place we would not want for our children and grandchildren. There is another future, an enormously attractive one, that is still within our power to build, but our country to chart a course to this better place.

That task begins with knowing where we are today. So let’s look at the present, and at a group of advanced democracies, specifically the major countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — twenty in all, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Nordics, Japan, Canada, and others. They can be thought of as our peer countries. What we see when we look at these countries is that compared with them, the United States now ranks at or very near the bottom in a host of important areas. America now has:

• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• the greatest inequality of incomes;
• the lowest government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) on social programs for the disadvantaged;
• the lowest score on the United Nations’ index of “material well-being of children”;
• the worst score on the UN’s gender inequality index;
• the lowest social mobility;
• the highest public and private expenditure on health care as a percentage of the GDP, and yet the highest infant mortality rate, prevalence of mental health problems, obesity rate, percentage of people going without health care due to cost concerns, and consumption of antidepressants per capita, along with the shortest life expectancy at birth;
• the third lowest scores for student performance in math and middling scores in science and reading;
• the second highest high school dropout rate;
• the highest homicide rate;
• the largest prison population, both absolutely and per capita; –
• the highest water consumption per capita and the second highest carbon dioxide emissions per capita;
• the lowest score on the Yale-World Economic Forum’s Environmental Performance Index, and the second-largest Ecological Footprint per capita;
• the highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;
• the third-lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of GDP; and
• the largest international arms sales.

International comparisons are only one way to examine what’s gone wrong. As I will discuss in Part I, these comparisons miss many of our most worrying challenges.

It is not for lack of knowledge, technology, or thoughtful policy proposals that we face this overwhelming, colliding collection of problems. One can easily identify a set of intelligent policy responses to almost all of these challenges. Groups advocating them pound constantly on Washington’s doors. Extraordinary technological opportunities remain untapped. Nor did these deplorable consequences simply happen as the result of larger economic and geopolitical forces over which we have no control.

When big problems emerge across the entire spectrum of national life, it cannot be for small reasons. We have encompassing problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political system. The many problems listed here and others discussed in Part I are the product of that system, compounded by conscious political decisions made over several decades by both Democrats and Republicans who have had priorities other than strengthening the well-being of American society and our environment. Many countries, obviously, took a different path, one that was open to us as well.

Source: James Gustave Speth. America the Possible: Manifesto For A New Economy, pg. 1-3. 2012.