|
Amusingly, the Freedom House analysis breaks out India and Indian Kashmir separately. If the USA could move its worst behavior into a separate line item, then it would probably do better too. Your corruption index puts the UAE, a federation of absolute monarchies, ahead of the United States. Hong Kong scores at the top of your economic freedom index, even as billionaires disappear from its streets because they displeased Beijing. Rankings that use a metric complicated enough to give the compiler heavy discretion on the order (like your 2-5) are compiled by people promoting certain ideals. Major powers rarely score at the top, regardless of whether they "deserve" to, because that defeats the political purpose--if you're trying to promote X, then telling the world's most powerful country that they're also the most X has little benefit, just encouragement for them to get complacent and backslide. In objective rankings, the USA's health care system is indefensible, unless you're both wealthy and in genuine need of unusually high-tech care; but that infant mortality is still just 1.3x Canada's. The American education system seems to be well above average; per your link the USA ranked 8/48 and 11/48 for science and math respectively, out of 48 countries that themselves are mostly well above the global average. It's reasonable to hold the USA to a higher standard than other countries, given its outsize influence and resources. Indeed, the impulse among both Americans and others to criticize America's real faults, sometimes in hyperbolic terms, is probably one of the major forces pushing to correct them. Anyone who net believes the American standard of living--especially for rich Americans, but for poor Americans too--isn't spectacularly above the global average is dangerously mistaken, though. |