How We Summarized the Results

  • Mixed: the trends go in strongly opposite directions during different periods.
  • Unclear: too few years of data to establish a trend.

Measures in green indicate an improving national trend or that we are outperforming at least 80% of countries.

Measures in red indicate a declining national trend or that we are outperforming less than 50% of countries.

Measures in yellow indicate stable trends or that we are outperforming 50-79% of countries.

The purpose of the State of the Nation Project is to provide an overall assessment of how the country is doing on a wide range of factors that we, and the American people, believe are important. Below is a summary of our report: 37 measures across 15 topics. We report each measure in two different ways (where possible): our national trend and the percentage of middle- and high-income countries we outperform (a higher number is always better). All of these measures were supported by a supermajority of the authors and the ones with p next to the measure name were also supported by a supermajority of the general public. In the Executive Summary and topic sections, we also discuss how our international ranking is changing over time and provide more discussion of the conclusions we draw from these data.

Conclusions

The various parts of the country do not operate in isolation. While we stop short of a full analysis that attempts to explain any individual finding or explain the findings’ complex interplay, we do highlight some key patterns and connections.

  • Conclusion #1

    We are a nation of extremes—extreme successes and extreme failures.

  • Conclusion #2

    Our national trends are improving in more areas than we are declining. However, relative to other countries, the opposite is true—we are declining in more areas than we are improving.

  • Conclusion #3

    Our economy is poised for continued success.

  • Conclusion #4

    Our rising incomes are not translating into greater perceived well-being and social relations.

The State of the Nation Project needs your support to pay for research staff and communicate findings.

In addition to updating our main reports over time, we hope to extend the project by, for example, creating a State of the States report and examining the reasons behind the successes and failures we have identified so far.