The problem I see here is that rationality is already very weakly defined for individuals and I know of no definitions in the context of society. A society can't even think (or can it?), how can it be rational?
The first answer that comes to mind is "A society can be considered rational if the institutions that society creates collectively would be considered rationally and intelligently designed had they been designed by an individual."
This is clearly not usually the case, but some societies have it much worse than others. Yvain's writings on Haiti reveal a society which is, by this metric, much less rational than America. I see no reason to suppose that existing first world countries have hit some theoretical ceiling on societal rationality.
So a society is rational if the institutions are rational ... and an institution is rational if its outputs seem rationally designed ... which is judged by a rational individual ... which is still hard to define.
I see your point and agree that there is room for improvement. Instead of "more rational" I would propose "less insane" which seems to fit the evidence as good as the other description.
Will one of these more insane societies become less insane by making sure everybody on the streets is less insane? The connection doesn't seem ob...
Does anyone know of a good article that illustrates how society is generally irrational, and how making society more rational would have huge benefits, because it'd be a very high level action?
I'm writing an essay about how to improve education, and one of my proposals is that a core part of the curriculum should be rationality. I believe that doing this would have huge benefits to society, and want to explain why I think this, but I'm having trouble. Any thoughts?
Edit: Part of Raising the Sanity Waterline talks about common ways in which people are irrational. However, they're all links to longer Less Wrong articles. Preferably, I'd like to illustrate it in a few sentences/paragraphs.