KUSA – The United States will easily win more medals and more gold medals at the Rio Olympics than any other country. The closest competitors are China and Great Britain who trail behind by dozens of total medals.
This naturally makes Americans think we’re pretty good at sports.
But one email to 9NEWS caught our attention this week, from someone who pointed out a website that tracks Olympic medals per capita.
Now we have a problem. The USA drops from number one in the overall medal count to 40th.
In first place? The tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada, whose one medal equals one medal per the country’s total population of 106,825 while the U.S. is averaging only one paltry medal for about each three million Americans. That makes Grenada, like, 30 times better at the Olympics than we are. Of course, there are about the same number of people in Grenada as there are in Westminster.
(If you visit the site you’ll note that the average and the rankings change as the U.S. wins more medals. But the final result of the 2012 London games was similar. Grenada in 1st, the U.S. in 49th).
This raises an even larger question. How does the United States compare to other countries in other categories? In other words, is the U.S. really the greatest country on Earth?
To help us answer this question we talked to Jonathan Moyer, a PhD, assistant professor and associate director of the Pardee Center for International Futures at the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Yes that’s a lot of words, but Dr. Moyer is a very smart guy.
You can see some of the cool stuff the Pardee Center at the Korbel School works on here.
Dr. Moyer doesn’t worry much about the U.S. per capita ranking for Olympic medals given the size of the country compared to places like Grenada.
The reason the U.S. wins more medals than other countries is easier to explain. “Olympic medals tend to co-vary with the size of your economy, how big you are. How much you can invest in training people to do really odd things like swim 100 meters backwards.”
This is a good time to describe the top advantage the United States enjoys, which is currently by far the world’s largest economy, measured by Gross Domestic Product in trillions of dollars. The current U.S. GDP is approximately 19 trillion. China is second at 12 and Japan a distant third at 4.3. Americans are big time producers.
We also spend the most on our military, 581 billion annually compared to China at 155 billion (all measured in U.S. dollars).
But what about the even bigger picture? How’s life in the United States compared to other countries? That can be a trickier question to answer, but something called the “Human Development Index” gives it a try.
This is a calculation prepared by the United Nations Development Programme (yes, they use the British spelling of programme) that seeks to compare how nations stack up with one another in various categories. The UNDP describes HDI as “…a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living…”
Dr. Moyer says it’s also about “…your ability to learn about the world and your ability to be kind of a healthy individual in the world as well…”
The factors include everything from employment rates to life expectancy to education.
In the most recent report (2015) the U.S. ranks 8th in the world. Norway, Australia and Switzerland are the top three.
So the U.S. is up there but not at the top.
But wait.
There’s also something called the “Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index” which takes into account the level of inequality within each country.
Now the U.S. drops about 20 spots to the same score as Poland, just behind Malta and just ahead of Cyprus and Greece.
Almost tied with Greece? Does this mean America isn’t the great country we thought it was?
Again, Dr. Moyer to the rescue. “The U.S. is a huge place with a really diverse population. I think that’s the first thing that people in the U.S. should understand about the Human Development Index… We’re not Luxembourg, you know, we’re not a really small country where we could take the full population and fit it in 10 different stadiums. This is a massive and diverse place.”
That isn’t to say the U.S. doesn’t have issues that lower our score in both of these measurements. In particular, “The U.S. has really significant inequalities in terms of income inequality but more importantly wealth accumulation inequality like the underlying resources people have access to.”
That sounds like the makings of a good political debate. In the meantime, America, bask in the glory of all those medals, just remember it’s all relative.
