U.S. trails wealthy peers on pay, health and food access, rights data shows

An annual human rights tracking project rates the United States well below other wealthy market economies on several basic measures of well-being, including pay, health and food access. The findings matter because the Human Rights Measurement Initiative says the country’s $32 trillion economy gives it far more capacity to support a decent standard of living than its results show.

Stephen Bagwell of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Susan Randolph of the University of Connecticut, who work with the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, said the U.S. has underperformed for about 25 years when compared with what its wealth should allow. The initiative measures whether people can get essentials such as health care, enough food, education, work and adequate income.

The project compares countries against peers with similar resources, using gross domestic product per person as its gauge of capacity. A score of 100% means a country is doing as much as the initiative estimates it can with the resources it has; lower scores point to unmet capacity.

Pay is the weakest U.S. result

The lowest U.S. mark comes on fair income. Bagwell and Randolph said the U.S. reaches only 27% of what a country with its wealth could achieve, using a benchmark set at half of a typical American household’s earnings. They said that is the worst result among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The U.S. performs better on job availability, scoring about 75% and ranking alongside the Netherlands and Iceland, according to the researchers. But they said countries including South Korea and Mexico score higher on that measure.

Bagwell and Randolph estimated that policy changes such as raising the federal minimum wage could lift 46 million people above the fair-pay threshold. They also estimated that about 5 million more people could move out of extreme poverty, defined by World Bank data as living on less than $4.20 a day.

The researchers said the broader U.S. work-and-income score has dropped from about 62% in 2000 to 51% today after accounting for the country’s rising wealth. They linked that decline to growing inequality, with economic gains concentrated among the richest Americans.

Health and food scores lag

On health, the U.S. scores about 80% of what the initiative says it could achieve. Bagwell and Randolph said Canada scores 90%, Japan 88%, Mexico 86%, Australia 93% and Iceland 97%.

The U.S. health score rose from 79% in 2000 to 82% in 2012, then fell back to 80% in 2023, according to the researchers. They said gains likely reflected broader insurance coverage after the Affordable Care Act, while the later decline was driven mainly by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 11.8 million Americans would lose access to government-subsidized health insurance because of changes in a tax and spending package President Donald Trump signed in summer 2025, according to the researchers. The CBO projection rises to 17 million people by 2034.

Food access is another weak area. The Human Rights Measurement Initiative score for the U.S. right to food was about 81% in 2023, placing the country 30th among 37 countries with available food security data, according to Bagwell and Randolph.

The researchers estimated that, with more effective use of resources, about 14.8 million more women and 9.1 million more men in the U.S. would have enough healthy food. They said the U.S. food score slipped from 81.9% in 2015 to 81.1% in 2023 as the economy grew.

Bagwell and Randolph said inflation, higher housing costs and changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program contributed to weaker food security. They also said about 3.4 million people lost food assistance from September 2025 to June 2026 because of cuts in Trump’s 2025 law.

ProPublica reported that SNAP enrollment in Arizona had fallen by about half as of April 2026, with more than 400,000 people losing benefits since July 2025. ProPublica also reported that remaining recipients in the state were getting lower benefits.

Education shows a split

The U.S. scores 76% on the overall right to education, ranking 20th among 38 OECD countries, according to the Human Rights Measurement Initiative data described by Bagwell and Randolph. They said the U.S. trails Japan and the United Kingdom but ranks ahead of Canada and Norway.

The education measure separates school access from quality. The U.S. scores 90.7% on access, while its average quality score is 61.3%, based on science, math and reading performance, according to the researchers.

Bagwell and Randolph said the results show a consistent gap between U.S. national wealth and outcomes for residents. They argued that recent cuts to health insurance coverage and food aid are likely to push several measures in the wrong direction.

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.