News flash: US is not at the top of the social justice heap!

Sometimes, a girl needs a chart to drive home a point, you know?

This one, from the New York Times, makes a pretty bleak point.  The Bertelsmann Stiftung Foundation of Germany recently released a report entitled “Social Justice in the OECD — How Do the Member States Compare?” It analyzed some metrics of basic fairness and equality among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. And America ranked among the ones at the bottom. The NYT made a spiffy, if heartbreaking graphic to capture the data. It pulls out certain measures of inequality, like child poverty and senior poverty, as well as offering up an overall “social justice” rating.


The bottom section of the chart – click here to see the whole thing.

Over the past few recession heavy years these kinds of analyses have become more prevalent in the mainstream. I say that, because for some folks in this country, appalling access to human rights has always been the norm. Anyhow, here’s your mid-day reminder: we’ve got a lot of work to do!