Some numbers that need accounting

Want to see some appalling numbers?

• The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).


• The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).


• Our workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).


• Foreign applications to U.S. grad schools declined 28 percent last year. Foreign student enrollment on all levels fell for the first time in three decades, but increased greatly in Europe and China. Last year Chinese grad-school graduates in the U.S. dropped 56 percent, Indians 51 percent, South Koreans 28 percent (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004).


• The World Health Organization "ranked the countries of the world in terms of overall health performance, and the U.S. [was]...37th." In the fairness of health care, we're 54th. "The irony is that the United States spends more per capita for health care than any other nation in the world" (The European Dream, pp.79-80).


• "The U.S. and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all their citizens" (The European Dream, p.80). Lack of health insurance coverage causes 18,000 unnecessary American deaths a year. (That's six times the number of people killed on 9/11.) (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005.)


• "Of the 20 most developed countries in the world, the U.S. was dead last in the growth rate of total compensation to its workforce in the 1980s.... In the 1990s, the U.S. average compensation growth rate grew only slightly, at an annual rate of about 0.1 percent" (The European Dream, p.39). Yet Americans work longer hours per year than any other industrialized country, and get less vacation time.


• As of June, 2004, the U.S. imported more food than it exported (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).

These figures are just a sample of Michael Ventura's proof that something very, very wrong has happened in a country that likes to call itself "the Greatest Nation in the World".

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This is for Poobah, sort of by request. I think it gets things in a nutshell, at the root of the figures, as it were:
Sorry, but it's not my drawing (I actually think I could do better than that)(but not today).