The U.S. Economy Is Racing Ahead. Almost Everything Else Is Falling Behind.

A politically diverse group of scholars — who together have advised every president since Bill Clinton and who work at many of the country’s top think tanks — released a report card yesterday on American well-being. The scholars spent months debating which metrics best captured the state of the nation and ultimately agreed on 37. They then tracked those measures since the 1990s and compared the United States with dozens of other countries on economic performance, physical health, mental health, social trust and more.

The group’s central finding is the one you can see in the charts above: The U.S. economy has outperformed most of its rivals in terms of productive might and innovation. But this success has led to rapidly rising living standards for most Americans.

“We’re so wealthy but so unhappy,” said Bradley Birzer, a historian at Hillsdale College, a Christian school in Michigan. “It seems like the central question of modernity.” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, put it this way: “We are the richest country in the world, but we chronically fail to offer broad-based economic prosperity and security.”

Economic growth in the U.S. has been remarkable, at least compared with growth in other high-income countries. In 1990, per capita gross domestic product in the U.S. — the total value of the country’s output, divided by the number of residents — was only 28 percent higher than in the euro area. The gap is now more than 80 percent.

Yet comparisons in most other realms make the U.S. look much worse.

This country has the lowest life expectancy of any rich country, which was not true for most of the 20th century. The U.S. has the highest murder rate of any rich country and the world’s highest rate of fatal drug overdoses. It also has one of the lowest rates of trust in the federal government and among the highest rates of youth depression and single-parent families. When Americans are asked how satisfied they are with their own lives, the U.S. ranks lower than it did three decades ago.

The committee that released the report did not offer detailed explanations for these trends, nor did it suggest policy solutions. The group was too diverse to agree on many of those questions. But The New York Times invited all 14 members of the group to offer their own explanations, and five themes emerged.