Best/Worst Places for Children
UNICEF has come out with a report ranking countries as better or worse places for children. The results are, perhaps, not all that surprising:
The charity looked at 40 indicators to gauge the lives of
children in 21 economically advanced nations — the first study
of its kind — and found Britain’s children were among the
poorest and most neglected.
Britain lagged behind on key measures of poverty and
deprivation, happiness, relationships, and risky or bad
behavior, the study showed. It scored a little better for education but languished in
the bottom third for all other measures, giving it the lowest
overall placing, along with the United States.
Children’s happiness was rated highest in northern Europe,
with the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark leading the list.
Two things to highly question; UN reports and Reuters. Dollars to donuts the methodology is skewed and so is the reporting.
I’m not sure how you “skew” reporting of a simple ranking. Looking at the report itself, the Reuters account seems to me to be accurate, or perhaps even favorable to the U.S., since in reality, the U.S. ranks substantially lower than the UK on the measures in question. As to the study’s methodology, I’ll leave that for you, since I just don’t have time to parse it, although I hardly think it’s fair to impugn it just because it was funded by UNICEF.
Here’s a link to the study, which was prepared by the Innocenti Research Center, in Florence, Italy.
http://www.unicef.org/brazil/repcard6e.pdf
What do all of these wonderful places for children to live have in common?
Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, Belgium, Japan, Ireland, and Switzerland
They all have significantly higher teen suicide rates that child hell-hole called the US – oh, and Merry Old England – their’s is almost half that of the US.
There’s an in-your-face statistical indicator if there ever was one.
I’m with Austin on this – UN report – take with shaker of salt.
Actually, Sweden, Japan and Ireland have lower suicide rates (among young males, who constitute the bulk of teen suicides) than the U.S. In the case of Japan, much lower. Other countries with lower suicide rates in N. Europe include Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Germany. Other countries with low suicide rates include such paradises as Albania, Colombia and Uzbekistan. So I’m not sure your indicator is as cut and dry as you suggest. For suicide statistics by country, see http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_sui_rat_you_mal-health-suicide-rate-y
oung-males
Suspect news sources skew reporting, even lists, by underreporting or otherwise by cherry picking the data (recall the New York Times skewing the data on married women). The UN, even UNICEF, is ideologically suspect and generally hostile to the United States. I know this from ten years experience there. Finally, here is an interesting piece by Nicholas Eberstadt on how poverty statisitcs can be skewed to make an ideological point…
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.13711/pub_detail.asp
A little more of the much vaunted skeptism of the left would be in order here!
Like I said, Austin, point me to some specific methodological objections, and I’ll take a look, but simply discounting something becasue it’s from UNICEF is not skepticism, it’s ideology. In any event, pointing to the authority of a publication from AEI to support a charge of bias against UNICEF is nothing if not ironic.
You wrote:
“UNICEF has come out with a report ranking countries as better or worse places for children. The results are, perhaps, not all that surprising:”
I am suggesting that you might be a little less gullible and consider the source. Guess you like the results of the “report.” US BAD, Netherlands GOOD.
And if you can get your bias out of the way, you might consider reading Eberstadt’s piece. He is one of our country’s leading thinkers on demography, Russia, North Korea and many other foreign topics.
Eduardo – I will take the hit on Sweden – their rate is 9.7 per 100K around the same as the US at 9.9, but the stats on Japan that I read said they are at 10.6. This is all on the WHO – talk about irony – website as of 2004.
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/country_reports/en/index.html
Anyway, are you saying the UN and its various agencies AREN’T ideological? By focusing on specific statistics they can certainly skew the result. The UN has a particular ideological outlook. It’s reports and recommendations almost always lean toward large government imposed solutions to problems.
A few years ago, the aforementioned WHO came out with a study of health care systems in which the US came in 25th and Italy was, I think 5th. I had the pleasure of living in Italy for two and a half years, and my family and I routinely used the Italian medical system. I don’t know what measures they used, but from the perspective of someone who used the systems – there is no way that is true. When our babysitter was in an auto accident, his family and friends needed to bring him bottled water and toilet paper. The room was unairconditioned in August, there were no screens on the windows – so the room was full of flies. The only thing that was better than in a US hospital was – typical of Italy – the food.
In the case of this report – two things stand out. They defined a poor child as one, basically, who has a per capita income of less than 50% of the national median regardless of what that income is. In other words, a kid in the US can have a significantly better lifestyle and is considered poor where a kid in Poland, for example, who had significantly less in absolute terms would not. Second, one of the indicators was social spending by the government – the higher the better the country did. No ideological component there?
Those countries are such great places to raise children that there’s no need to actually have them.
None of those countries have replacement fertility rates — the Scandinavian countries have a replacement fertility rate per woman of 1.7, Spain at 1.2, Canada at 1.5, Belgium at 1.6, Japan 1.4 …
Strange.
It’s tedious to hear that any criticism of our countrty = US bad.”
Or that such critiques generally come from a heavily partisan perspective….
Actually, the Nordic countries stand out on a whole host of indicators. Many point to high unemployment and low wmployment in places like France and decry the weakness of the “European welfare state”. But countries like Denmark do not fit this pattern. They boast some of the highest employment rates in the world, and are also the most equal societies with low poverty rates. Plus, they choose good “family values” policies like heavily subsidized childcare and lengthty maternity leave. The right in the US, on the other hand, talk a lot about “family values” but don’t really do much about it. Kind of like their approach to abortion.
It looks to me as though there’s a fairly high positive correlation between size of country and child poverty rates – the countries with lower poverty rates are generally the smaller ones. For an interesting discussion of a similar question, about size of country and broader welfare measures, see Tyler Cowen’s post: “Can we just scale up Denmark?”
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/01/can_we_just_sca.html
1. Any study that purports to look at poverty, yet ranks Poland right in the middle while the United States is next to Mexico at the bottom — well, one ought to be just a bit skeptical.
2. I’m not a statistician, but the methodology seems bogus. It ranks nations by “percentage of children living in ‘relative’
poverty, defined as households with income below 50 per cent of the national median income.”
Hmm. By definition, 50 percent of all households in every country are below the national median income. That’s just what a median is. Also, such a comparison ignores the absolute level of the median income — quite important, I would think.
So what they’re really doing is comparing *fertility levels* among the below-median households in various countries. And what the study really finds is that relatively poorer people in Mexico and the United States tend to have more children than the richer people in those countries, whereas people in Denmark are all about equally fertile (or infertile, as the case may be).
It’s mildly interesting that relative fertility rates in the United States are different than relative fertility rates in Poland, but this fact doesn’t justify Mr. Penalver’s suggestion that this means that Poland is a “better place” to be a child.
3. Another thing that immediately struck me as very misleading: On page 7-8, the UN discusses the limitations of looking at relative poverty levels. But then, in what is presented as a resounding defense of the use of poverty levels, the report italicizes this quote: “As the American sociologist Susan Mayer has written, “income is positively correlated with virtually every dimension of child well-being that social scientists measure, and this is true for every country for
which we have data.”
Well, I have sitting on my shelf Susan Mayer’s Harvard Univ. Press book, “What Money Can’t Buy,” which found (to Mayer’s own surprise) that family income isn’t nearly as important as other researchers have thought.
So alarms went off. I looked up the Susan Mayer report that is cited (it’s available here http://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/publications/csre/influence-of-parental-income.pdf ), and sure enough, Mayer comes to the same sort of conclusion: Income matter to a modest extent, but what’s really important is parental characteristics. Here’s Mayer herself, on page 68:
“All the research reviewed in this report suggests that the often large correlation between parental income and children’s outcomes is mainly due to family background characteristics that result in both low parental income and worse life chances for children.”
Mayer’s report concludes with this equivocal paragraph:
“Although the effect of parental income on any particular outcome is generally small to modest, it is clear that parental income makes a contribution to many aspects of children’s well-being. This means that income gains have the potential to make a big difference in the lives of children. Policy makers will need to weigh the potential for gain to child well-being from policies that enhance the income of low-income families against the ccost of such policies, including the social cost of any countervailing negative effects on families.”
As for the quote that the UN italicizes, it appears on page 30, but is immediately followed with this observation: “in studies that control for relevant exogenous parental characteristics the effect of parental income declines.” Mayer then spends the rest of that chapter explaining why the existing research mostly suffers from “weaknesses” that make it “inconclusive” (see page 48), and even includes a paragraph (page 48 again) noting the entire research literature may be biased because researchers might tend to publish only those results that find a “significant” relationship between income and some indicator of wellbeing.
In short, the way that the UN uses the Mayer quote is intellectually dishonest. They’re taking a quote completely out of context, (given that one of Mayer’s main points is to *undermine* the existing poverty literature), and instead using that quote as the sole response to the argument that relative poverty isn’t the most meaningful indicator.
I don’t have time to read further, but those are the things that caught my eye in the first 7 pages.
Also FYI, Eduardo’s link was to a previous UNICEF report. Here’s the most recent one: http://www.unicef.org/media/files/ChildPovertyReport.pdf I notice that it no longer highlights any quote from Susan Mayer. So it’s at least that much more honest than the previous report.
I’m no statistician either, but I believe Stuart has confused an important distinction, which I doubt the actual statisticiants in on the report didn’t simply miss. He wrote:
“It ranks nations by ‘percentage of children living in relative poverty, defined as households with income below 50 per cent of the national median income.’
“Hmm. By definition, 50 percent of all households in every country are below the national median income. That’s just what a median is.”
Of course 50 percent of the population lives below the median income. The study measures those who live below 50 percent OF the national median. In other words, the study isn’t looking at those who live below the median, but those whose income is less than half the median income.
Quite right. My bad. That said, my other observation still seems to be true — what the UNICEF report is really measuring is relative fertility rates. In other words, the United States’ “poverty” ranking here would improve if richer people started having more children, or if poorer people got more abortions — regardless of the actual levels of household wealth or income.
Stuart,
You said:
It ranks nations by “percentage of children living in
‘relative’ poverty, defined as households with income
below 50 per cent of the national median income.”
Hmm. By definition, 50 percent of all households in
every country are below the national median income.
It is correct that, by definition, 50 percent of households make less than the median income, but being in the bottom 50 percent and making less than 50 percent of the median income are two different things. The median household income in the US in 2004 was roughly $44,300, so 50 percent of that is $22,150. Everyone making less than $44,300 was within the bottom 50 percent, but only people making less than $22,150 were below 50 percent of the median income.
One of the main things being measured (as I read the study) is income inequality. In a country where there was no inequality at all, nobody would make less than 50 percent of the median income. For example, if everyone in the country made $30,000 a year, the median income would be $30,000, and no one would make less than 50 percent of that ($15,000).
There was carping above at how poorly the official US poverty line measures real poverty, but the UN study doesn’t use the official poverty line, so however inadequate the official poverty line is, it’s not relevant here.
I am surprised that “conservatives” seem so upset at this study. It looks to me like one of the major factors in child poverty is the number of single-parent families. The US and the UK seem to lead the industrialized countries in single-parent households, and there is a high correlation between being a child in a single parent household and being poor.
If ever there were a study that is confusing, this is. But none of us here has seen the report and that might be part of it. Some comments for whatever its worth.
If 12 percent of the country lives under the poverty line, how does that correlate with 51 percent of the US married population being without a partner? And what does it mean when we say that 73 percent of poor households own a car or a truck?
Yes Italy and other socialized countries do not compare by a long shot to the medical care in the US, for two segments. The Middle and Upper Classes who have health care and the poor who get it for free. Someone on medicaid does much better than those in socialized medicine countries.
In that picture the misery index seems to be just above the poverty level where people cannot afford health care.
Another point is, are we talking about happiness or measuring what a person does or does not have? I acknowledge the distinction is dangerous, especially for church officials who hold that we must always have the poor, but there are intangibles.
It is a sad spectacle to see so many Americans burying their head in the sand when their country does not come out on top of any index that purports to measure happiness, or satisfaction or prosperity.
Making the U.N. a scapegoat really is a sad excuse for an excuse. America will simply continue to decline as a country until it takes a serious look at what European Countries have been doing for the past 50 years that has left the U.S. far behind in the kinds of indicators used in the UNICEF study.
Eduardo is to be congratulated for sharing this story. I doubt he expected to get the negative, belittling, and anti-intellectual drivel from this discussion group that has appeared. I think it only confirms that most are not subscribers to Commonweal but rather interlopers to the principles of the commonweal, and the legacy its editors, have over the past 80 plus years tried to instill into the discourse, which is America.
Some of them must be rolling over in their grave.
Jborst,
As an interloper, I would like to respond to your post.
First, I don’t care whether the US comes in first or last on any UN index. My criticism, and I think others, is that the UN frequently comes out with these reports with the intention of forcing a particular agenda.
Every country has good and bad aspects depending on your perspective. As I said, I lived in Italy for a while and spent times working and on vacation in many other European countries. I loved Italy. It was a wonderful place. I think generally the people there are happier, and enjoy life more than Americans. They have a stronger sense of family (although I think that is weakening). When I returned to the States it was hard adjusting, in fact. Things here are louder, faster paced, and less gentle. That being said, I think Americans are harder working, more innovative, and – despite the impression left by people who measure it by government spending – extremely generous.
It’s not a competition. In fact, if the study had actually been about “happiness” and the US came out near the bottom, then I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but the material part of the study really seemed aimed at is income distribution. I don’t even object to most of the rest of the study as it relates to education etc. I do think, however, that the likely response – as we have seen in the UK – is that we need the government do do something. In the news story that sopmething is to spend 4.5 Billion pounds on poverty programs. That’s what the UN wants.
The things that the Europeans are more successful at – like education – have very little to do with spending and government programs as such. The US spends far more per student on primary education and more as a percentage of GDP than the EU. The reasons for our problems, like poor education, high teen birth rates, etc. are primarily social/moral phenomena – not a lack of government programs. This UN report, and others like it, identify a panoply of problems, but they always suggest the same solution.
Gotta go – my ostrich flock is leaving.
Borst — I have no objection to any portions of the report that focus on happiness, children’s relationships, children’s risk behaviors, etc. I have no reason to doubt that America could do a lot better in some of those areas.
Still, I am suspicious of the whole process. As I explained above, an earlier version of the UNICEF report takes a Susan Mayer quote that she set up specifically in order to debunk, and instead represents it as her own considered opinion. This sort of blatant dishonesty makes me suspicious that someone is pushing an agenda.
Do you think that looking up original sources is “anti-intellectual drivel” or antithetical to the “principles” of Commonweal?
I suspect that jborst had my comment about demographics in mind. Paying attention to birthrates seems to be identified as a conservative issue — and therefore perhaps not a commonweal principle — though there’s no reason it should be, especially since european-style social benefits can only be sustained with a working population.
If anyone is in the habit of looking at the academic group blog Crooked Timber there is an extremely interesting response to this study from the Netherlands posted recently.
One growing trend, from American commentators with a nationalistic right perspective and with a special emphasis among those who also claim to be Christian including some on the Catholic right, is the constant belittlement of the United Nations no matter what department.
This is a particularly dangerous bit of propaganda. All thinking Catholics should read Mary Ann Glendon’s paper “Catholic Thought and the Dilemma’s of Human Rights” (Chapter six in Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions ed. Robert E. Sullivan, U. of N. D. Press 2001). She tells how the Church’s encyclical’s influenced the UN Declaration on HR and how they in turn have influenced the Church since as well as briefly describing the root differences between the UNDRH and the American version. She also describes how internal politics and the Cold War reshaped the U.S.A.’s take on the U.N. This has only grown worse with time until we have the debacle that is George W. Bush and the Iraq War.
Essentially, what she points out is the difference between the Church’s and UN’s more communitarian view of Human Right and the American individualistic model. There is a very interesting take on this from the perspective of the teaching of law in Canada since the promulgation of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. See
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=603c89d7-424c-46c9-aa55-33def9d522fe
Here’s a clip:
The teaching of civil liberties has changed, too. Today, civil liberties aren’t about unemployment insurance, Medicare, old age and disability pensions, social and economic rights, poverty law and class struggle. The new kid on the block is human rights, and it’s all about cutting back on “too much government.” Civil liberties has been re-engineered as human rights courses dealing with constitutional protections against abuses by the state — the one player best positioned to defend the vulnerable from private power. On-the-ground “war on poverty” activities no longer elicit much professorial or student enthusiasm.
Sounds terribly American to me and it is a view inconsistent with Commonweal’s long tradition of communitarian values. That is one reason why I reacted so viscerally to those who jumped on the UN study. I once called Commonweal a “beacon of sanity” in a less than sane America (It was quite a few years ago so I no longer recall the context.) It still is both within the U.S.A. and the Church. And that is why I get so upset when folks on this blog sound just like secular libertarian individualists rather than “Commonweal Catholics”.
I trust the term “thinking Catholics” is used with the appropriate sense of ridiculousness?
Let me add one note to jborst’s good postings.
Shouldn’t the report in question prod us to think more carefully about the condition of children in the U. S.? Whatever flaws the report may have, it is hard to doubt that a staggering number of children in our country live in severe poverty. Furthermore, all too many of them have no access to decent health care.
Let’s discuss improvements for these children. Whether the U. S. ranks high or low, is not tie issue. Whether we are taking care of children, here and abroad, is the issue.
At present, the record is bad.