At first glance, it would seem that in this era of “big data” policy-makers and regular people alike would have at their fingertips the information they need to understand their world and make it better. Unfortunately, that’s far from the case. Though we know the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and current account balance quarterly, its retail sales and business inventories monthly, and interest rates and stock market numbers daily, we
rarely hear critical statistics on our country’s people. How long can a baby born today in Missouri, or New Mexico, or Minnesota expect to live? What’s the share of adults who have completed high school, or college, in Houston as compared to Dallas? What wages and salaries are typical of Latinos in the United States, and how do they compare to those of whites or African Americans? Measure of America’s mission is to highlight and make sense of data points like these and use them to tell the story of how American people—not just the American economy—are doing. We do so using the global gold standard for measuring human well-being, the human development
approach and index.