Capabilities

When Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences pointed to how he "improved the theoretical foundation for comparing different distributions of society's welfare and defined new, and more satisfactory, indexes of poverty" and "restored an ethnical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems." Sen's 1999 book, Development as Freedom, is essential reading for any one working on poverty and inequality and a great introduction to his ideas.

Sen's ideas have been influential in international circles—most notably, in the creation of the UN's Human Development Index—but they have yet to really take root in the United States. A new effort, the American Human Development Project, could change that. In mid-July, the project is releasing:

... the first-ever human development report for a wealthy, developed nation. It introduces the American Human Development Index, which provides a single measure of well-being for all Americans, disaggregated by state and congressional district, as well as by gender, race, and ethnicity. The Index rankings of the 50 states and 436 congressional districts reveal huge disparities in the health, education, and living standards of different groups.

According to the project:

Over 150 countries around the world have adapted [a Human Development Index] to analyze progress within their own countries, writing national Human Development Reports and calculating HD Indices for their own societies. But this approach has never been applied to the U.S. or any industrialized country.

Although the UN HDI has limitations (which hopefully will be addressed in the US report), it's a big improvement on conventional measures of well-being which typically focus on a single income measure. The next president would be wise to adopt a multi-dimensional measure like the American Human Development Index as the single most important measure of progress in the United States.