Governments get checkups; social scientists use quality-of-life indicators to gauge the health of states and cities

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 11, 1997 | by Jeffrey R. Sipe

Social scientists use quality-of-life indicators to gauge the health of states and cities.

How am I doin'?" asked Ed Koch when he was mayor of New York City. Today, his critics and supporters alike would be able to answer that question with more than personal opinions. Social scientists are devising "well-being" indices that attempt to measure the social health of cities, just as the Dow Jones measures economic performance.

More than 200 states and cities across the country are conducting well-being studies, amassing data on infant mortality, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, health-care coverage and access to affordable housing. Ultimately, just as economists refer to the rise or fall of the stock market, social scientists will point to similar fluctuations in social indices.

"The goal is accountability," says Marc Miringoff of the Fordham University Graduate Center in New York. Miringoff publishes the Index of Social Health, an annual nationwide study. "The official American portrait is made up of a body of leading economic indicators like the gross domestic product, the Dow Jones and so on," Miringoff tells Insight. "The index gives a different view of how we are doing.... We are not just gathering data. We are getting out the idea that we need to monitor social health."

Miringoff has plenty of imitators. In 1989, Neil Goldschmidt, then-governor of Oregon, initiated a program intended to transform the Beaver State's stagnant economy into a high-wage, high-skilled, high-service mecca. As part of the effort, he created a study called Oregon Benchmarks to measure the state's social health.

"This is really a way for people to see what they're getting for their money," says Jeffrey Tryens, director of Oregon Benchmarks. "We wanted a macro assessment, but we started out with way too many indicators--259. We narrowed that down to 92, which we then grouped into seven categories."

Researchers gathered information county-by-county for five years, emphasizing grass-roots participation, before Oregon Benchmarks issued its first report in 1996. "Some things made the administration look vulnerable," Tryens admits. The state's air was cleaner--the result of federal, not state, regulations--but teen pregnancy was rising.

Linda Kohl, who administers a similar study called Minnesota Milestones for the state's Department of Planning, agrees that such studies can backfire on the administrations that commission them. "It was politically risky," she says of Milestones, initially implemented by Gov. Anne Carlson. "Fortunately, the press did not seize on it as a means of attacking the government.... It got people talking. It stimulated a huge public discussion." More importantly, claims Kohl, the study enabled Carlson to implement education reform and make new tax credits available to Minnesotans.

Like Oregon, Minnesota gathers information on 79 indicators grouped into 20 categories. Neither state has adopted Miringoff's method of using a single number to rate the overall social health. Tryens actually downplays the index aspect to such research. "It's a good [public-relations] and communication model," he says of Oregon Benchmarks, but its practical value is limited.

Nevertheless, says Miringoff, the simple existence of so many social-health studies is a positive sign. "They're being generated from the local level up," he says, "and from the state level down. This is truly a grass-roots movement for accountability in government. It's very exciting."