Kristen Lewis

The American Human Development Index: Results from Mississippi and Louisiana

The American Human Development Report is an application of the conceptual framework pioneered by Mahbub ul Haq, Amartya Sen, and others to look at human welfare more broadly than traditional measures of economic growth. It includes a Human Development Index, a composite measurement of well-being and opportunity comprised of health, education, and income indicators. Human development reports have now been adapted for over 160 regions around the world, where they have been embraced as critical benchmarks for human progress. But the American Human Development Report is the first to apply a human development index to an affluent-country context. Just as the global Human Development Index can help explain why two developing countries with identical Gross Domestic Product (GDP) can nevertheless fare so differently in more comprehensive metrics of quality of life, so too can an American Human Development Index illuminate the distribution of disparities and opportunities within a single developed country. This chapter looks specifically at applications of the human development framework to the states of Mississippi and Louisiana. In so doing, it uncovers that while certain population groups within these states thrive at the same level as the average of the top-ranked American state (Connecticut), other groups within these states lag decades behind. Recommendations for improving human developing rankings in these two Gulf States follow.

California and the American Human Development Index

DOI 10.1515/cjpp-2012-0002 Calif. J. Politics Policy 2012; 4(2): 25–48 Research Article Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis California and the American Human Development Index Abstract: Roughly one in every eight Americans calls California home. The state is a vital source of America’s food, leads the nation in innovation, and ranks first among the states in terms of economic activity. Viewing California strictly through the lens of money and economics tells only one story. The American Human Development Index tells what is happening in the lives of ordinary people. Keywords: California economy; California ethnicity; California population Sarah Burd-Sharps, Social Science Research Council, e-mail: sarah@measureofamerica.org Kristen Lewis, Social Science Research Council, e-mail: kristen@measureofamerica.org Roughly one in eight Americans calls California home. The state leads the nation in innovation, as measured by the number of patent application filings, and ranks first in terms of economic activity, as measured by gross state product (nearly

The Human Development Approach: Stimulating a Fact-Based Conversation About Improving the Human Condition in Sonoma County, California

1.9 trillion).1 A vital provider of America’s food, California produces nearly half of all US- grown fruits and vegetables. If California were a country, it would have the world’s eighth-largest economy. Yet viewing California strictly through the lens of money and economics tells only one story. The American Human Development Index aims to tell another story: what is happening in the lives of California’s people. California is a state of contrasts, being home to people with vastly differing levels of well-being. In The Measure of America 2010–2011: Mapping Risks and Resilience, the latest iteration of the national human development report series, California as a whole ranked 12th of the 50 states and Washington, DC, on the American Human Development Index. This series applies a widely accepted inter- national approach for assessing the well-being of different population groups: the human development approach. The centerpiece of this work is the American Human Development Index, a composite measure made up of health, education and income indicators and expressed as a single number from 0 to 10. While Californians are already aware that disparities exist within their state, the American Human Development Index provides an easily understood 1 Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Economic Downturn Widespread among States in 2009.”

Human Development Indicators

Measure of America (MOA) is a nonpartisan research and advocacy project of the nonprofit Social Science Research Council. Its mission is to provide easy-to-use yet methodologically sound tools for understanding well-being and opportunity in the United States. This chapter provides an overview of the human development concept and how MOA has applied it in its research, advocacy, and participatory approaches to community well-being, particularly at the local level. It then explores how the application of the human development concept in a specific county, Sonoma County, California, resulted in a report, A Portrait of Sonoma County: Sonoma County Human Development Report 2014 (Burd-Sharps and Lewis, A portrait of Sonoma county: Sonoma county human development report 2014. SSRC, New York. Retrieved from http://www.measureofamerica.org/sonoma, 2014), that in turn galvanized action. The report documented sobering disparities in community well-being across the towns and cities that comprise Sonoma County by presenting indicators of health, education, and material living standards, and analyzing them through the human development lens. This paper documents some of the impacts of the report on policy-making, funding, and programmatic decisions by public agencies and private organizations in the year since the report’s launch. Factors that have contributed to building ownership of the report’s findings among stakeholders in the county and have helped build momentum to put the report’s data and recommendations into use are discussed in light of findings from a case study using interviews with Sonoma County stakeholders.