South and the third world | Michael Tomasky

With regard to my "snarky" and "elitist" final graf of the previous post, it strikes me that maybe it's a good idea to look at certain measures of social health on a comparative basis, examining regions of the US and other countries in the world. Maybe we'll do this on an ongoing basis.

Let's start with one obvious index of social well being, infant mortality rates. The international numbers below are from the UN Population Division, the state numbers from the Kaiser Foundation.

As the map on t...