America Underperforms Its Wealth Most on Inequality, Prisons, and Homicide

Rich countries tend to score well on most quality-of-life metrics, so raw rankings mostly restate GDP. The more interesting question is where a country beats or misses the level its wealth predicts. This chart shows that residual for the United States across 21 metrics: each bar is the gap, in percentile points, between where the US actually ranks and where a country of its income should rank.

The biggest misses are inequality (46 percentile points worse than predicted), incarceration (40), and homicide (32). The overperformers are labor share of GDP, rule of law, and corruption perception. Predictions come from GDP per capita (log) using the latest year per metric, with 109 to 196 countries behind each one.

The same data also powers a sillier companion piece: the USA as a 2K player card.