Where U.S. Stands in Best of Various Categories
When politicians in power make statements like America has never been more prosperous or strong before, and politicians not in power make statements that they will make America great again—well, this kind of gets confusing. What exactly is our place in the world today?
Google is an amazing tool. For people like myself who like to write musings, any stats needed are a few buttons pressed away. So I began to pull some specific areas of ‘greatness’ out of the air and went to Google to find out where America is ranked in that category. Of course the results may be more or less accurate but we will assume here they are ‘roughly’ accurate.
Best railroad systems——not in the top ten except NYC got 9th place on urban rail system,
Best Botanical Gardens——U.S. manages usually to get one garden listed in top ten
Best Architectural Wonders in the World: U.S. manages to get one listed on most lists
Best health care system in the World: U.S. ranked 11th
Most expensive health care system: U.S. ranked 1st
Best schools in the World: The United States places 17th in the developed world for education, according to a global report by education firm Pearson. Finland and South Korea, not surprisingly, top the list of 40 developed countries with the best education systems. Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore follow. The rankings are calculated based on various measures, including international test scores, graduation rates between 2006 and 2010, and the prevalence of higher education seekers. Pearson's chief education adviser Sir Michael Barber tells BBC that the high ranking countries tend to offer teachers higher status in society and have a "culture" of education.
Best wages for average workers in the World:
Unemployment rate: U. S. ranks 14. only data from the 34 relatively rich and developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are included here
Vacation days: Finland and France both offer 30 days paid vacation every year. That means if you were inclined to spread out your vacation days evenly you could take every 12th day off. At the other end of the scale, the US guarantees no holiday.
Minimum wage compared to average salaries in a country: U.S. ranked 33
Best energy efficient economy: From a maximum possible 100 points, Germany comes in at the top with 65, followed by Italy (64 points) and the European Union as a whole (63 points). China comes top for the efficiency of its buildings, Germany for industry, Italy for its transportation. And the U.S.? It is 13th place overall (out of 16 countries, remember), with 42 points, behind China, Canada, and India, but ahead of Russia, Brazil, and Mexico, which fill the last three places. In other words, for a leading industrial nation, the U.S. isn't doing particularly well.
Country with best roads:
The statistic shows the countries with the highest road quality in 2014/15. U.S. is 14th
Countries with the highest concentration of wealth at the top: The most authoritative source comparing wealth-concentration in the various countries is the successor to the reports that used to be done for the United Nations, now performed as the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook. The latest (2013) edition of it finds (p. 146) that in the U.S., 75.4% of all wealth is owned by the richest 10% of the people. The comparable figures for the other developed countries are: Australia 50.3%, Canada 57.4%, Denmark 72.2%, Finland 44.9%, France 51.8%, Germany 61.7%, Ireland 58.4%, Israel 68.9%, Italy 49.8%, Japan 49.1%, Netherlands 54.6%, New Zealand 57.6%, Norway 65.9%, Singapore 61.1%, Spain 54.0%, Sweden 71.1%, Switzerland 71.5%, and U.K. 53.3%. Those are the top 20 developed nations, and the U.S. has the most extreme wealth-concentration of them all. However, there are some other countries that have wealth-concentrations that are about as extreme as the U.S. For examples: Chile 72.5%, India 73.8%, Indonesia 75.0%, and South Africa 74.8%. The U.S. is in their league; not in the league of developed economies. In the U.S., the bottom 90% of the population own only 24.6% of all the privately held wealth, whereas in most of the developed world, the bottom 90% own around 40%; so, the degree of wealth-concentration in the U.S. is extraordinary (except for underdeveloped countries).
Developed countries with the lowest crime rates:
The US has more guns per capita than anywhere else in the world. We have massive organized crime, drug and human trafficking, and ever-looming terrorist threats. We have one of the most organized and efficient police forces on Earth. We also have a never-ending news cycle to remind us of these things. With sensationalism in the news, and stories of shooting sprees on a monthly basis, is violent crime really getting worse in America? Where does our perception that crime is growing meet the actual numbers? How does violent crime in America stack up against the rest of the world?
Perhaps the most difficult part of comparing violent crime in the US and abroad is determining who we’re comparing with the US. Middle Eastern, Central American, and African metropolises are by and large much more dangerous than US cities, but are they representative of the rest of the world?
Most of Europe is safer than Detroit, but are Detroit and Europe representative?
78.6% of Americans have confidence in local police; a measure only topped by Scandinavian nations and Canada.
More than 3 out of 4 Americans feel safe walking around where they live at night. While this is a measurement of perceived crime, and not crime itself, the perception is that the US as a whole is as safe as most modern industrialized nations. This is probably bolstered by the fact that 78.6% of Americans have confidence in local police; a measure only topped by Scandinavian nations and Canada. Plus the fact that a large percentage of violent crime in America is concentrated in relatively small geographic areas, and, as we know, the US is a massive place.
Violent crime has declined sharply in the US since the mid 1990’s. While this is due to a variety of changes in enforcement, rehabilitation of criminals, and overall higher standards of living, a large portion of the similarities between the crime levels of US and western European countries hinges on differences in what crimes are reported. The FBI counts four categories of crime as violent crime: murder and non-negligible manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. While aggravated assault is the only assault category included under violent crime reports in the US, other nations include the much more numerous level 1 assault in violent crime reporting. This makes the US appear relatively less violent from a statistical perspective.
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Another difference between the US and other relatively safe developed nations is that the US has a much higher homicide rate than similarly “safe” countries. 14,827 people were murdered in the US last year. This is way down from the 24,526 US murders in 1993, yet still leaves the US at 4.8 murders per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, Japan has .4 murders per 100,000 residents. Germany has .8, Australia 1, France 1.1, and Britain–who has recently garnered media attention for being the most dangerous wealthy European nation– has 1.2.
The most dangerous US cities rank among the most deadly cities in the world. New Orleans, which topped the list in 2012, saw one homicide for every 2000 residents. To put this number in perspective, the average homicide per 100,000 citizen rate for the US is 4.8. Meaning you’re more than 10 times more likely to be the victim of a homicide in New Orleans than America as a whole.
Bear in mind, however, that the cities with the top 5 homicide rates in the world boast substantially higher rates than any other cities on the list. To put the numbers in context, you’re more than 3 times likelier to be the victim of a homicide in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, than in New Orleans, and more than 30 times more likely when comparing San Pedro Sula to the US as a whole.
Another notable trend is that no European or Asian cities are in the top 50 deadliest cities. This complicates the picture of the US standing toe-to-toe with the industrialized world as a low violent crime nation. At the very least, the deadliest cities in the US have many more homicides than the deadliest cities in Europe and Asia. At most, the US is a in a pandemic of homicides, even while other types of violent crime are stifled.
Best Military Forces in the World:
Here the United States ranks #1. The irony is that the U. S. has not won any victories in decades despite successful invasions of various countries like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, etc.
Instead it is more a pattern of invade, occupy for several years, declare victory, and leave behind a country in worse shape than before we invaded. Occupation and victory are not the same. Victory implies the objectives of the invasion were met. Russia is #2 and China #3.
Biggest Military Budgets:
The U.S. outpaces all other nations in military expenditures. World military spending totaled more than $1.7 trillion in 2013. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total.
U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next nine largest military budgets around the world, combined.
Conclusions:
I tired of looking categories up.
Clearly no other country is in any position to militarily conquer the U.S. As for a nuclear war, what the outcome of that would exactly be is not clear. The consequences of even a few successful atomic bombs on any current civilization is simply speculative. There would obviously be unimaginable consequences from that kind of warfare. No one would win it would simply be a case of how bad would each country lose. The radiation after affects would simply be speculative.
Just as clearly, having all this military might so far has been relatively useless in modern day conflicts. Uniformed armies fighting on battlefields is mostly a thing of the past. A major form of modern war is via terrorism and this kind of war is available to most any committed group, small or large. While the U.S. can invade most countries at will and reduce it’s infrastructure to rubble, this mostly just frees up all the opposing groups in the invaded country to terrorize each other with thugs taking turns controlling different areas of the invaded country. And the United States becomes a world wide target for terroristic acts. This, in turn, infuriates the U.S. and so far any path to break the cycle has not been achieved.
And just as clearly, our falling behind the rest of the world in so many of the categories above, is related to two major factors: The amount of money spent on military matters, and the amount of our wealth now owned by 2-5% of our population. There is simply not enough money left for the U.S. to compete with other countries in most of the categories listed in this musing. Look, Bill Gates as an individual has more money than the 20 least richest countries in the world. If prosperity is measured by the wealth of a few, the U.S. is in good shape. If it is measured by the wealth of the many, or the quality of education, health care for everyone, etc., as listed above, we are drifting further and further down the list. It has become the best of all possible worlds for a few and the worst of all possible worlds for more and more, and the latter growing at a faster and faster rate.
The complexity of it all has us neutralized into a mode of inaction. Politics has become little more than certain groups seeking to control the government so they can make other groups pay the piper. Few are willing to see the playing field leveled as that would mean all of us would have to pay the piper. It is all about whose taxes are to go up, who is going to get tax breaks, who is going to have the best salaries, who is going to get good health care, who is going to have good schools, who gets the greatest share of the wealth produced by labor—those who did the labor—or those who thrive on the bargains achieved on the backs of slave labor, etc.
In the end, none of us individually, impact on the evolutionary process. What works better, survives a changing environment. What can’t handle a changing environment, fades out of the evolutionary process. Which individual species member is the first to have a trait to make the move forward in an evolutionary process, is not important. As I like to point out, if the Wright Brothers hadn’t invented the airplane, someone else would have. Evolutionary time is on a scale of millions of years. We have a lifespan of like 100 years at best. So we think we, collectively and individually, are driving the evolutionary process. It would be nice to visualize what the world will look like a 1000 years from now. But we simply can’t. When Donald Trump claims he is going to ‘make America great again’ we can be sure we have a self serving lunatic at the microphone. Look, evolution isn’t even about America. America has existed as a product of the evolutionary process. There is no permanence to America anymore than there is to anything else involved in the process. The only constant is change and time. Evolutionary Time, not human time. All any of us can do is play the cards in our hand the best we can, be thankful for any help others have given us along our short journey, and live as much of our lives as we can with the Golden Rule as our ethical mantra, and we will at least achieve some contentment along the way. It’s not all that complicated.
