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When I ask a lecture theatre full of students how they would feel if they could never listen to a piece of music again, most are horrified. Many have been plugged into their headphones until the moment the class begins. But without fail, one or two will shyly admit that their lives would not change at all if music didn’t exist.
Psychologists call this “music anhedonia”, meaning an absence of pleasure for music. And a new paper from neuroscientists in Spain and Canada suggests it is caused by a problem with communication between different parts of the brain.
I see it often in my own research and practice in people with memory loss, where I ask people to select favourite songs as a way of accessing significant memories.
It has always fascinated me that some people look at me blankly and say, “I’ve never been that bothered by music”. It is such a contrast to the majority who love to talk about their first record, or the tune played at their wedding.
Recent evidence shows considerable variation in the depth of people’s emotional response to music. Around 25% of the population are hyperhedonic, which is an almost obsessive urge to engage intensely and frequently with music.
Research in this field typically uses the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ), which asks people about the significance of music in daily life: how often they listen to records, whether they hum along, and if there are songs that give them a shiver down the spine.
Low scorers are classified as having music anhedonia and many researchers further verify this in the lab by measuring heart rate, sweat response and breathing while music is playing. For most of us, these physiological markers change dramatically during emotional songs. But in those with music anhedonia, there are often no physiological effects at all.
One theory is that reduced enjoyment for music may reflect a more generalised anhedonia, an absence of pleasure for anything. Often, this is linked to disruption to the reward pathways in the brain, in areas such as the nucleus accumbens, orbitofrontal cortex and insula.
It is a common feature of depression, which, along with other mood disorders, can correlate with a lack of response to music . However, this does not explain specific music anhedonia, where people happily enjoy other rewards such as food, socialising and films, but remain indifferent to music.
Not every child made to take music lessons grows up to thank their parents.foto-lite/Shuttersock
An alternative possibility is that people with reduced interest in music simply don’t understand it, perhaps due to difficulties with processing melody and harmony. To test this, we can look at people with amusia – a deficit in music perception, which affects the ability to identify familiar tunes or detect wrong notes. This occurs when there is reduced activity in key regions in the frontotemporal cortex in the brain, which handles complex processing of pitch and melody. However, some people with the condition have an extreme and obsessional love of music.
In any case, other research shows that those with music anhedonia often have normal musical perception, with no problem recognising songs or distinguishing major from minor chords.
So, what is going on? The new paper provides a detailed analysis of all the research in this field to date. The researchers explain that while the brain networks underlying music perception and reward are both intact in people with music anhedonia, the communication between them is severely disrupted. There is little to no traffic between the auditory processing parts of the brain and the reward centre.
People with typical responses to music have significant activity in this pathway, which is higher for pleasant music than for neutral sounds. A 2018 study showed that you can increase music-induced pleasure by artificially stimulating these communication tracts using magnetic pulses.
The new analysis may give scientists insights into clinical conditions where everyday rewards seem to be reduced or enhanced, for example eating disorders, sex addictions and gambling problems.
These findings also challenge the common assumption that everyone loves music. Most people do, but not all, and the variation comes down to differences in the wiring of the brain. Sometimes it follows brain injury, but more often people are born this way, and a March 2025 study found evidence of a genetic link.
Music is everywhere – in shops, gyms, restaurants, healthcare settings – and it can be incredibly powerful. But perhaps we should resist the urge to see it as a panacea and respect the fact that for some, silence is golden.
Early childhood is a critical period for brain development, which is important for boosting cognition and mental wellbeing. Good brain health at this age is directly linked to better mental heath, cognition and educational attainment in adolescence and adulthood. It can also provide resilience in times of stress.
But, sadly, brain development can be hampered by poverty. Studies have shown that early childhood poverty is a risk factor for lower educational attainment. It is also associated with differences in brain structure, poorer cognition, behavioural problems and mental health symptoms.
This shows just how important it is to give all children an equal chance in life. But until sufficient measures are taken to reduce inequality and improve outcomes, our new study, published in Psychological Medicine, shows one low-cost activity that may at least counteract some of the negative effects of poverty on the brain: reading for pleasure.
Wealth and brain health
Higher family income in childhood tends to be associated with higher scores on assessments of language, working memory and the processing of social and emotional cues. Research has shown that the brain’s outer layer, called the cortex, has a larger surface are and is thicker in people with higher socioeconomic status than in poorer people.
Being wealthy has also been linked with having more grey matter (tissue in the outer layers of the brain) in the frontal and temporal regions (situated just behind the ears) of the brain. And we know that these areas support the development of cognitive skills.
The association between wealth and cognition is greatest in the most economically disadvantaged families. Among children from lower income families, small differences in income are associated with relatively large differences in surface area. Among children from higher income families, similar income increments are associated with smaller differences in surface area.
Importantly, the results from one study found that when mothers with low socioeconomic status were given monthly cash gifts, their children’s brain health improved. On average, they developed more changeable brains (plasticity) and better adaptation to their environment. They also found it easier to subsequently develop cognitive skills.
Our socioeconomic status will even influence our decision-making. A report from the London School of Economics found that poverty seems to shift people’s focus towards meeting immediate needs and threats. They become more focused on the present with little space for future plans - and also tended to be more averse to taking risks.
It also showed that children from low socioeconomic background families seem to have poorer stress coping mechanisms and feel less self-confident.
But what are the reasons for these effects of poverty on the brain and academic achievement? Ultimately, more research is needed to fully understand why poverty affects the brain in this way. There are many contributing factors which will interact. These include poor nutrition and stress on the family caused by financial problems. A lack of safe spaces and good facilities to play and exercise in, as well as limited access to computers and other educational support systems, could also play a role.
Reading for pleasure
There has been much interest of late in levelling up. So what measures can we put in place to counteract the negative effects of poverty which could be applicable globally?
Our observational study shows a dramatic and positive link between a fun and simple activity – reading for pleasure in early childhood – and better cognition, mental health and educational attainment in adolescence.
We analysed the data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) project, a US national cohort study with more than 10,000 participants across different ethnicities and and varying socioeconomic status. The dataset contained measures of young adolescents ages nine to 13 and how many years they had spent reading for pleasure during their early childhood. It also included data on their cognitive, mental health and brain health.
About half of the group of adolescents starting reading early in childhood, whereas the other, approximately half, had never read in early childhood, or had begun reading late on.
We discovered that reading for pleasure in early childhood was linked with better scores on comprehensive cognition assessments and better educational attainment in young adolescence. It was also associated with fewer mental health problems and less time spent on electronic devices.
Our results showed that reading for pleasure in early childhood can be beneficial regardless of socioeconomic status. It may also be helpful regardless of the children’s initial intelligence level. That’s because the effect didn’t depend on how many years of education the children’s parents had had – which is our best measure for very young children’s intelligence (IQ is partially heritable).
We also discovered that children who read for pleasure had larger cortical surface areas in several brain regions that are significantly related to cognition and mental health (including the frontal areas). Importantly, this was the case regardless of socioeconomic status. The result therefore suggests that reading for pleasure in early childhood may be an effective intervention to counteract the negative effects of poverty on the brain.
While our current data was obtained from families across the United States, future analyses will include investigations with data from other countries – including developing countries, when comparable data become available.
So how could reading boost cognition exactly? It is already known that language learning, including through reading and discussing books, is a key factor in healthy brain development. It is also a critical building block for other forms of cognition, including executive functions (such as memory, planning and self-control) and social intelligence.
Because there are many different reasons why poverty may negatively affect brain development, we need a comprehensive and holistic approach to improving outcomes. While reading for pleasure is unlikely, on its own, to fully address the challenging effects of poverty on the brain, it provides a simple method for improving children’s development and attainment.
Our findings also have important implications for parents, educators and policy makers in facilitating reading for pleasure in young children. It could, for example, help counteract some of the negative effects on young children’s cognitive development of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
A Columbia University linguist explores how race and language shape our politics and culture.
Last
week, Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old man who was Black and homeless, was
ranting desperately to afternoon passengers on the F train in New York
City. According to the police, witnesses described him as “hostile and
erratic,” and some claimed he was throwing trash. “I don’t have food, I
don’t have a drink, I’m fed up. I don’t mind going to jail and getting
life in prison. I’m ready to die,” he reportedly shouted.
A
24-year-old white ex-Marine named Daniel Penny placed Neely in a
chokehold that lasted a reported 15 minutes. Neely struggled during the
hold and other passengers helped try to restrain him. He was released
after he became unconscious. He was, in fact, dead, or would be soon.
Penny was questioned by the police and then discharged.
Nothing
Neely did remotely justified this fate. The fact that Penny, as of this
writing, has not been arrested pending more information seems
unconscionable regardless of legal niceties. Based on what is known, it
seems obvious that cutting off someone’s oxygen supply for so long would
risk killing him — especially following the notorious choking deaths of
Eric Garner and, more recently, George Floyd.
At
the same time, the conversation among political leaders in the news and
on social media has largely ignored the experience of legions of
subway-riding New Yorkers. It implies that Neely was merely a desperate
human being who should not have been detained in any way short of the
intervention of a trained professional — an opportunity vanishingly
unavailable in a subway car at any given moment.
This
perspective is rooted in an enlightened quest to sympathize with the
plight of the mentally ill in a society grievously unprepared to help
them. But in addition to minimizing the experiences of the other
passengers on the train, it fails to put enough attention on the genuine
public policy solutions needed by people like Neely.
We
must be able to keep in our minds two things. One is that Neely was
unjustifiably killed. The other is that the episode, in all of its
horror, highlights what New York City subway riders are being asked to
endure daily — and that this, too, is not just.
I
have been riding the New York City subways almost daily for over 20
years now, other than for about a year during the pandemic. And I can
testify that these days, about once every week one can expect to be in a
car with a person, almost always male, who is actively menacing other
passengers. I know these men can’t help it. Many are without homes and
not in full control of their faculties. I suspect that they are often
lonely and part of what they are doing is seeking some kind of human
connection — to be mentally ill can be to find even negative attention a
kind of solace compared to no attention at all.
But
the problem is that in seeking this negative attention, these men are
often not plangent but furious. They walk up and down the subway car
yelling into individual faces. They stomp. They ball their fists. They
curse. These are not just troubled supplicants who occasionally get a
little pushy. They are men who make you genuinely afraid that you are
about to be assaulted. And in my experience these men are most likely to
be directly confrontational with women. It’s worth noting that while
the majority of Neely’s more than 40 arrests by the N.Y.P.D. were for
minor infractions, three were for assaulting women in the subway system.
Men
in a state of potentially violent agitation are now so common on the
subway that I am wary of having my daughters, ages 8 and 11, ride with
me, especially after an incident when one such man singled us out and I
had to quietly instruct my girls to keep their eyes down and not move.
Another
thing that worries me about having such unstable and potentially
dangerous men on the subway is that in my experience they are
disproportionately Black, like Neely was. I do not see this as evidence
of something pathological about Black men; I am very well aware that
this racial breakdown can be traced to inequities both historical and
current. But one can know this and yet worry that one’s kids, too young
to understand what is called societal racism, will start making
simplistic generalizations. And not only one’s children: I fear that the
current situation on the subways may foster racial bigotry more
broadly.
As to the pairs of cops now
so common in the subways, I have never seen them do a thing about these
men. This includes an instance when I explicitly asked a couple of
police officers to intervene when a man was trawling the cars
threatening to beat up one person after another, each potential victim
looking up helplessly, wondering whether he meant it. It was especially
hard to watch when he got to a Latina mother with two small kids.
It
bears mentioning that the people who have to suffer from these men’s
behavior are disproportionately working class. Let’s face it: My income
bracket means that I can leaven how much I have to deal with the
uncertainty and fright by Ubering, using my car and working from home.
But it’s not fair that low-income commuters need to endure such
harassment because of the failures of America’s mental health and law
enforcement systems.
How we grapple
with what to do in response to people like Neely also requires hard
conversations and frank language. I’ve heard this past week that we
should tolerate the reality that these men make us “uncomfortable” on
the subway. But this word vastly understates how one feels in such
circumstances. A more accurate word is “terrified.” Your guts clench,
especially if you’re on a long stretch between stations or you’re with
kids. New Yorkers these days have read stories of people being pushed
onto the tracks or stabbed by troubled individuals in subway stations.
To suggest in this context that subway riders should exert a kind of
aggressive enlightenment and get used to being made “uncomfortable”
because men like these are the product of an unjust system beyond their
control is to expect far too much.
I
am going to venture an idea that may be unpopular: Jordan Neely, in all
of his innocence, did deserve restraint. Only that. He deserved neither
injury nor any more discomfort than necessary, and certainly not death.
Where precisely Penny’s actions and intentions fall on this spectrum is a
question for the legal system to interrogate aggressively. But society
has a problem on its hands when mentally ill people are terrifying
innocent citizens trying to get to work or back to their homes. The
system needs to help both the Jordan Neelys and the rest of us. And this
means there should be an honest discussion about the role of cops and
subway officers in confronting and even detaining the mentally ill more
frequently. Our mental health system, too, needs to better ensure that
people who present symptoms of the kind that Neely did are more
rigorously restricted from menacing or threatening others.
We
all wonder: Why was Neely on his own in that subway car, anyway? We are
not only correct, but compassionate, to ask that question. Do we ask
partly out of fear of encountering someone like him yelling into our
faces, or worse? Yes, and we should make no apology for it. Finding ways
to accommodate the needs of people as damaged as Jordan Neely serves
both them and the broader public.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”
After a good night out you may not be surprised when you wake up feeling rough the next morning. But what may surprise you is if your friends aren’t feeling the same way. Some may feel worse, some better and some (if they’re lucky) may not feel any of the negative consequences at all.
This is the variability of a hangover. In research, hangovers are measured on an 11-point scale (zero being no effects and ten being extremely hungover). In my own research, participants have reported hangovers on this scale anywhere between one (very mild) to eight (severe) – while other research has estimated around 5% of people may be hangover resistant.
So why the difference? There’s more to it than simply how much we drink. Researchers are now starting to explore the many biological and psychological mechanisms that could influence our experience during hangovers.
Biological mechanisms
Some research suggests that people with a variation of the gene ALDH2 report experiencing more severe hangovers.
When we consume alcohol, it’s broken down by the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase into acetaldehyde – a protein important for the emergence of hangover symptoms. However, the ALDH2 gene variant limits the breakdown of acetaldehyde, leading to a greater buildup of the protein – thus greater hangover symptoms.
Age and sex can also influence the way in which a hangover is experienced. A recent online survey of 761 Dutch alcohol consumers has found that hangover severity declines with age, even when accommodating for the amount of alcohol consumed. Interestingly, the authors also reported differences in hangover severity between men and women. These sex differences were greater in younger drinkers, with young (18 to 25-year-old) men tending to report more severe hangovers compared to young female drinkers. However, it’s not currently known why these differences exist.
Psychological factors
Certain psychological traits may be linked to how a hangover is experienced – including anxiety, depression, stress levels and even personality.
Previously, research suggested that neuroticism, a broad personality trait which tends to cause people to see the world in a negative way, can predict the severity of a hangover. However, recently this idea has been disputed with another study finding no link between hangover and personality.
This is somewhat surprising, given that extroversion (a personality trait usually characterised by being sociable and outgoing) is positively associated with binge drinking behaviours in college students – though it doesn’t appear to be linked to worse hangovers. This is despite evidence that more frequent heavy drinking is linked to more severe hangover experiences.
Anxiety, depression and stress are all also linked with more severe hangovers. Each of these moods are associated with a “negative bias” -– a tendency to interpret the world more negatively. Our findings show hangovers also tend to make people interpret the world more negatively. As a result, hangovers may exacerbate this negative bias, leading some people to feel worse than others.
Coping mechanisms
It’s possible that the way we cope with adverse situations could underlie the variation in hangover experiences.
Pain catastrophising refers to the extent to which a person emphasises the negative experience of pain. Research shows that people with high scores of pain catastrophising report more severe hangovers – suggesting that they’re focusing on their negative symptoms and possibly amplifying them. Other studies have also shown that people who tend to cope with their problems by ignoring or denying them tend to experience worse hangovers.
Emotion regulation is another key psychological mechanism that helps us to deal with difficult situations by effectively managing and responding to emotional experiences. Interestingly, although people who are hungover report feeling it’s more difficult to regulate their emotions, this may not actually be the case – with research showing participants are just as able to control their emotional response compared to those who weren’t hungover. This could mean that people choose easier (but less effective) regulatory strategies during a hangover – such as avoiding feelings of guilt or shame. But this is yet to be determined.
What can we do?
Although researchers may have identified a few natural compounds which may alleviate overall hangover symptoms, further research is still needed to determine whether these should be recommended for treatment. In the meantime, the best strategy for alleviating your hangover is going to be up to you to determine.
But one study suggests a strategy commonly used by students to cope with the misery of a hangover – by “suffering” together and bonding on their experiences – may be helpful in helping relieve at least some of the negative emotional effects of a hangover. Taking care of your own personal wellbeing more generally and finding better strategies to reduce stress levels and adopt better coping mechanisms may also help you deal with the negative consequences of a hangover.
Though of course, if you really want to avoid a hangover, you could always choose non-alcoholic alternatives.
You can see that measuring life expectancy at birth
is not a perfect guide to how long humans did live in pre-capitalist
societies. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that life expectancy on
average rose sharply once science came to bear on hygiene, sewage,
knowledge of the human body, better nutrition etc. Of course, there
were sharp inequalities in life expectancy in class societies between
rich and poor.
If
we accept that life expectancy is a good measure of human development,
the latest data are revealing about capitalist societies in the 21st century. Life expectancy fell in the US in 2021 to its lowest since 1996, the second year of a historic retreat,
mainly due to COVID-19 deaths. The decline from 2019 marked the
largest two-year drop in life expectancy at birth in close to a century,
the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found. Also,
disparity in life expectancy between men and women widened last year to
the highest in more than two decades, with American men now expected to
live just 73.2 years, nearly six fewer years than women.
Deaths
from COVID-19 contributed to over half of the overall decline in US
life expectancy last year. COVID-19 was associated with more than
460,000 U.S. deaths in 2021, according to the CDC. But COVID was not the
only factor in the decline. Drug overdoses and heart disease are also
major contributors, the data showed. Interestingly, deaths from suicide
decreased in 2020 during COVID, but they were still the fifth-biggest
contributor to the drop in overall life expectancy last year.
Suicide-related deaths are the third-leading contributor to the decline
in life expectancy for American men.
While
US life expectancy decreased from 78.6 years in 2019 to 76.9 years in
2020 and 76.1 years in 2021, a net loss of 2.4 years, in contrast, peer
countries averaged a smaller decrease in life expectancy between 2019
and 2020 (0.55 years) and a 0.26-year increase between 2020 and 2021,
widening the gap in life expectancy between the US and other advanced
capitalist economies to more than five years. The decrease in US life
expectancy was highly racialised: as the largest decreases in 2020
occurred among American Indian/Alaska natives, hispanics, black and
Asian populations. For native Americans and Alaska natives, life
expectancy fell to 65, close to the national average during World War
II.
This
decline in life expectancy in rich US contrasts with the continued rise
in China throughout the COVID pandemic – where the death rate from the
virus was minimal compared to the US and Europe. As a result, in 2021,
China’s life expectancy at birth is now higher than that of the US!
This outcome is a stark and depressing condemnation of American capitalism in the 21st century. “The
stagnation in life expectancy reflects deep societal challenges — not
just in our health system but also in our economic and political
systems,” said Dave Chokshi, a physician and former NYC health commissioner.
The US has more drug-overdose deaths than
any other high-income country—both overall and on a per capita basis.
Even before the pandemic, life expectancy in the U.S. declined for
consecutive years in 2015 and 2016, largely because of the opioid epidemic and drug overdoses. The U.S. has a higher death rate from road accidents than Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union. Even on a per-miles-driven basis, the US still has a higher death rate than much of Europe.
At 40 percent among
adults, the US obesity rate is double the average of most European
countries and eight times higher than Korea’s or Japan’s. Although the
precise relationship between weight and health is contentious, the
nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund has stated bluntly that America’s obesity levels are responsible for roughly one-fifth of deaths among American adults aged 40 to 85.
The U.S. has fewer general practitioners per capita than
most rich countries, in part because of the long and expensive medical
education encourages doctors to become highly paid specialists. And
along with this lack of affordable and accessible primary care, the US
has the highest rate of avoidable deaths of any rich nation. (Examples of the OECD’s definition of “avoidable” mortality include deaths related to alcohol, shootings, accidents, and influenza.)
Life
expectancy is an important measure of human development but it is not
the only measure. The UN has created a human development index (HDI)
which measures not just life expectancy but also educational advancement
and economic prosperity. The HDI was launched in 1990. In its latest Human Development Report (HDR) the
data confirm that capitalism in the 21st century, if it ever was, is no
longer progressive in the development of human well-being. The report
says that “decades of progress in terms of life expectancy, education
and economic prosperity have begun unravelling since the pandemic.”
Over the past two years, nine out of ten countries have slid backwards on their HDI.
Switzerland
sits at the top of the index with a life expectancy of 84 years, an
average of 16.5 years spent in education and median salary of $66,000.
At the other end of the scale is South Sudan where life expectancy is
55, people spend just 5.5 years in school on average and earn $768 a
year. But recent setbacks in a majority of the 191 countries included in
the index, especially in life expectancy, have taken development levels
back to those seen in 2016, reversing a 30-year trend.
Over
the years since the index was introduced, many countries have faced
crises and slid backwards, but the global trend consistently moved
upwards. Last year was the first time the index declined overall since
calculations began and this year's results solidified that downward
trend. And “the outlook for 2022 is grim," says Achim Steiner,
one of the HDR authors, who points out that more than 80 countries are
facing problems paying off their national debt. "Eighty countries being one step away from facing that kind of crisis is a very serious prospect," he says. "We are seeing deep disruptions, the tail end of which will play out over a number of years."
When
we look at the league table of countries in the HDI, the usual richer
advanced capitalist economies are at the top. But the US is not in the
top 20; it’s 21st, although it has by far the largest in
population of these richer countries. And if we compare the progress in
human development in the top G7 economies using the HDI since 1990, we
find, whereas the US was the highest of the G7 in 1990, it has slipped
to fifth out of seven. While Germany’s HDI rose 13.6% from 1990-2021,
the US HDI rose only 5.6%. And the US rose the least of the G7 in the
21st century. Strangely, the UK rose the most from 1990, if from a lower start, and was the fastest riser in the 21st century to date. This may be due to the higher than average spending on education in the 1990s and early 2000s.
1990
2000
2021
1990-2021
2000-21
Ger
0.829
0.889
0.942
13.6
6.0
Can
0.860
0.890
0.936
8.8
5.2
UK
0.804
0.862
0.929
15.5
7.8
Jap
0.845
0.877
0.925
9.5
5.5
US
0.872
0.891
0.921
5.6
3.4
Fra
0.791
0.844
0.903
14.2
7.0
Ita
0.778
0.841
0.895
15.0
6.4
Every G7 country did better than the US – another indicator of the relative decline of US imperialism.
The
UN has also developed an inequality-adjusted HDI, where the degree of
inequality of income is fed into the HDI to change the outcome. Every
country has a degree of inequality. But some are much worse than
others. Among the G7 economies, the level of inequality in the US and
Italy is so high that it reduces the HDI in those two countries by over
11% and knocks them even further down the HDI league.
This
is not surprising given the huge rise in inequality and poverty in the
US since the HDI was started. In January 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that
in 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3
million more than in 2019 – that’s an official poverty rate of 11.4
percent, up 1.0 percentage point from 10.5 percent in 2019. The “poverty threshold” for a four-person family in 2020 was $26,496. And the US Federal Reserve reports that
in 1989 the top 1 percent controlled 23.5 percent of the nation’s
wealth and, in 2022, its share had increased to 31.8 percent or $44.9
trillion. The bottom 50% of wealth holders had 3.7% of household wealth
in 1989; now they have 2.8%.
Inequality
is even higher in many Global South countries, in particular, Brazil,
South Africa and India have shocking inequality rates that knocks their
HDIs by over 25%.
If
we look at the largest so-called emerging economies by population,
including the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), as
you might expect, China achieved the greatest improvement in its HDI of
all countries. From a lowly 0.48 in 1990, China’s HDI reached 0.77 in
2021, a rise of 59%. Compare that to India, which started pretty much
at the same HDI as China but reached only 0.63 in 2021, a rise of 46%
but still way less than China.
1990
2000
2021
1990-2021
2000-21
Arg
0.72
0.78
0.84
16.5
8.1
Turk
0.60
0.67
0.84
39.7
25.1
Russ
0.74
0.73
0.82
10.6
12.3
Slan
0.64
0.69
0.78
23.0
13.7
Ukr
0.73
0.70
0.77
6.0
10.4
China
0.48
0.58
0.77
58.7
31.5
Mex
0.66
0.71
0.76
14.5
6.9
Bra
0.61
0.68
0.75
23.6
11.0
S Afr
0.63
0.63
0.71
12.8
12.6
Indo
0.53
0.60
0.71
34.0
18.5
India
0.43
0.49
0.63
45.9
28.9
Whereas
China was just 5pts higher in its HDI than India in 1990, now it is 14
pts higher. In those three decades, China has come from behind to
overtake Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia – and close the gap
with the US from 40pts behind to just 15 pts.
For
topical purposes, I also looked at Ukraine, Sri Lanka and Russia. In
1990, when the Soviet bloc fell, Ukraine had a HDI of 0.73, virtually
the same as Russia and ahead of tiny debt-ridden Sri Lanka. By 2000,
the ‘shock therapy’ of the return to capitalism lowered the HDI in
Ukraine and Russia while all others in the list rose. And 30 years
later, Ukraine’s HDI has crawled up just 6% to 0.77, falling behind Sri
Lanka and Russia, both of which did not do very well either.
Are
the major economies of the global South catching up with the G7
countries of the global North? If we exclude China and India, then the
global South average (as defined above) was 18pts behind the G7 average
in 1990. In 2021, the gap was 14pts. So hardly any progress in closing
the gap in 30 years. And the countries of Global South chosen here are
mostly the best performers, not the poorest and weakest.
