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Indicators were education, health and wealth. Norway and Germany ranked top in the world, while the USA and Canada ranked 8 and 9, respectively. In the USA, Connecticut ranked No. 1 while Mississippi ranked No. 50.
It's not entirely fair to compare a state to an entire country. Apples and oranges.
...except that this is the whole point of the study.
Pretty wild that if you chop up the USA into 50 pieces our very worst is still better than some developed countries are on average. And countries like Britian and France are among the US's worst.
If you chopped up other countries, there would be some appalingly bad areas. Southern Italy, for example...
Pretty wild that if you chop up the USA into 50 pieces our very worst is still better than some developed countries are on average. And countries like Britian and France are among the US's worst.
So Mississippi is actually more equivalent to Turkey. My birth-state of Arkansas is like Russia. (Without the eyes cold and gray) However Connecticut is still tops and akin to Ireland while California is above Japan. This is likely going by the older method of calculating HDI as the top nation it has, Iceland, probably really has slipped since 2009.
The newer method is kind of more favorable to the US. Rather than going by school attendance and literacy it measures the education index by "average years of school completed." Going by that Mississippi might come out above Italy because Americans tend to want a higher percentage of our population to be college educated than most nations. I'm not sure I favor this new method, but looking through the list I'm not sure the old method on education was right either. Not that I've been to either, but I don't think Italy is more developed than Germany and I don't think I've known people who went to Europe who think that either. I guess maybe I would have switched it to "reading proficiency" (rather than simple literacy) and "secondary enrollment" (Jr. High, High School), but maybe those would be too hard to measure of developing nations. In that case maybe just switch "simple literacy" to measure everyone over 11 or something.
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