When United Nations member states agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) two years ago, they were setting down a consensus view on the future of nations. The SDGs represent humanity’s best aspirations for national improvement, from curbing hunger and disease to reducing inequality and responding to climate change. And, in their completeness and breadth, the SDGs suggest that countries find a more harmonious balance between industry and economy on one side of the ledger, and environment and social factors on the other.

By that difficult-to-reach yardstick, nowhere is perfect (including the U.S.). Even the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark)–so often at the top of quality-of-life ranking exercises–fall down in some areas of the SDGs, according to a new report. By traditional development measures–including poverty and life expectancy–they do very well. But, judged by their impacts on the environment and other countries, their negatives are significant as well: These societies consume high amounts of resources and produce high amounts of harmful waste, like electronic by-products.

The report, now in its second year (we wrote about the first report here), ranks countries by their progress on the goals. It comes from the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which supports the implementation of the goals, and Bertelsmann Stiftung, a German foundation. Jeffrey Sachs, a renowned development economist, oversaw the research. Sachs is one of several academics looking to expand understanding of national performance beyond GDP and other economic measures to include data on well-being, lifestyle, and social services.

This year, SDSN added a new element to its scoring. As well as ranking 157 countries on their within-borders performance (e.g., on education, infrastructure, and clean water standards), it also measures what it calls “spillover effects,” which make up 9 of the 99 indicators, or 10% of the overall score. That includes a country’s pollution, financial secrecy, and weapons sales–all of which affect the world at large–and aren’t necessarily captured by national statistics.

The SDG and spillover lenses puts the U.S. in a particularly lowly spot: 42nd place. Among the world’s most prosperous countries, only Chile, Israel, Mexico, and Turkey are behind us in the rankings. On a dashboard of the 17 SDGs, we have eight red marks (representing significant “challenges”), along with the likes of India, Mexico, and Turkey.