The laughable UN rankings

This is one of those assumptions that can bring one up short:

The UN recently demoted the US to 41st, down from 32nd, in a global ranking based on its sustainable development goals.

…

And, on this measure, the US comes just behind Cuba and just above Bulgaria.

The SDGs being a series of plans about how places should develop economically. Thus, by those very standards, Cuba is a more desirable end goal for economic development than the US is.

Which is, how should we say this, odd.

The trick to this is that the SDGs are deliberately constructed in order to make places like Cuba look good and nasty, capitalist, places like the US look bad. Take, for example, poverty. We do indeed agree that the aim of having an economy, even of the existence of a society, is that the life and living standards of the poor improve.

Here are those SDGs on poverty. They’re very much more complex than the earlier Millennial Development Goals for an obvious reason. That one was just to reduce absolute - the below $1.90 a day type - poverty and that was the only MDG overachieved and early. But that would never do as it was the spread of free market capitalism to places like China that achieved it - not the point at all. So, in the SDGs there’s lots and lots about relative poverty within a country instead of about actual poverty so much. Ta Da! Communist dictatorships look better.

Which is a goodly part of what explains the US ranking. On poverty it is agreed that the US has no $1.90 a day poverty nor any $3.20 a day - just none. However, there is a poverty line (the usual 50% of median household income used in international comparisons) and this means a significant downgrading of the US position on poverty. Despite the fact that by any measurement of absolute poverty the US doesn’t have any. They’re mixing inequality of income with poverty that is.

Cuba is of course entirely different. There we have no information - none on $1.90 a day poverty, none on $3.20 a day and none on inequality. But Cuba ranks better than the US becausesomethingmutter.

We can attempt to divine those numbers in a different manner. GDP per capita at PPP (so, accounting already for differences in costs) is a shade under $10,000 for Cuba. So, if we assume that all income is entirely and wholly equally distributed (it isn’t) and also that incomes to people are the only thing in an economy (by one GDP calculation of course they are, but here we mean for consumption, and they’re not) then that puts the entire population of Cuba below the American poverty line (around $13,000 or so these days).

But the UN seems to think that Cuba does better on poverty than does the US.

Well, yes. At which point we’re not going to take the UN rankings by SDGs seriously now, are we? Unless, of course we were a Guardian columnist.