In June, Measure of America and Opportunity Nation released the "Historical Report of Opportunity," an important new study on the status of Americans. The report investigates Americans' opportunity to achieve well-being on three key metrics-economy, education, and community-from 1970 to 2010. It is an extension of the Opportunity Index, a scorecard database that was started in 2011 to measure Americans' ability to access opportunity. (This is the latest in my occasional series of reviews of scorecard databases, which compile data and assign rankings on various elements of societal performance for U.S. states and for countries worldwide.) Around the same time of the release of the Opportunity Index, two other scorecard databases appeared. The Economic Security Index debuted in 2010 and measures American citizens' economic security based on the likelihood of falling into severe economic hardship. In 2011, the Freedom in the 50 States database came out. It measures American freedom on dozens of economic, political, and social metrics.
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