“The US is the Greatest Country in the World”–sometimes, anyway

Those of us in the US are probably used to hearing people go on and on about our high status in rankings of desirability. And in some ways, we are. (I am a US citizen and a lifelong resident, so in this post, I’m going to use “we” and “our” when referring to Americans.)

• We are super-cosmopolitan, able to create cities where hundreds of different ethnic, racial, and religious groups not only live and work together but enjoy each other’s food, music, etc.
• We introduced modern democracy to the world–a huge improvement over the divine right of kings
• We have enormous diversity in geography, agriculture, weather conditions…whatever you want, you can find it somewhere in the US
• US technology leadership sparked enormous progress in fields as diverse as computing, clean energy, and space exploration

BUT on a lot of other metrics, we fall alarmingly short. Consider, for instance:

• Healthcare: we pay a lot more yet have worse outcomes, as documented in this report by Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs (who has written a great book on sustainability, BTW)
• Gun violence: The US rate of 3.96 gun deaths per 100,000 people puts us way behind many democracies. UK does 100 times as well as we do, while Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and even China do 200 times better. Even Tajikistan and Gambia do 20 times better than we do.
• Access to public transit: Despite several belts of dense population in relatively close proximity (the Boston-Washington corridor, Santa Barbara to San Diego, Cleveland to Minneapolis, etc.) the US is shamefully behind. Western Europe meets five times as much of its transportation needs through public transit, and even Canada (with far lower population density than the US) does better than we do.
• Energy use per capita: of 218 countries listed in this table, the US is #208–the 10th worst in the world. The other nine are either oil-rich desert countries that have enormous energy resources and use them to cool unbearably hot temperatures or places with long, frigid winters.
• Paid vacation: Most developed countries mandate several weeks per year; the US has no mandate at all, and the custom in many industries is a mere ten days.
• Quality of life: The US is number 15. Not horrible, but we could certainly do better!
• Robustness of our democracy: Sadly, once the shinning light to all nations, the US dropped from full to flawed democracy in 2016, and hasn’t recovered. Appallingly, we are rated #25.

I could go on,  but you get the idea. In metric after metric, the US was once the leader and now lags.

Isn’t it time to reclaim that greatness?