[gyardley]

America has a single federal government, yes. If you just want a ranking, you can go ahead and use the national average.

However, America is ridiculously diverse culturally, and just using the national average is useless for understanding anything about America.

Perhaps the Americans in the thread aren't trying to avoid an unfavorable comparison - it's not like Americans aren't aware of the pros and cons of their own country. Perhaps they're actually trying to teach you something about their country and point out that relying on averages can be misleading.

[grecy]

> and just using the national average is useless for understanding anything about America.

I agree. We're talking about understanding America compared to other countries, not things about America internally.

>it's not like Americans aren't aware of the pros and cons of their own country

I completely disagree with that statement. How many times have you heard someone say "Best country in the world" with no understanding of the outside world? I'm continually shocked when meeting Americans that have absolutely no idea their infrastructure, education, health care, leave entitlements and general quality of life sucks compared to the developed world. They genuinely think they are the best in the world because that has been driven into them from day 1.

> relying on averages can be misleading.

Obviously looking at an average is exactly that. An average across the entire population, not a deep dive into where is the highest and where is the lowest, etc.

[tadfisher]

Those are strawman arguments. Meeting uninformed Americans is not evidence that the entirety of the American populace is ignorant of their failings as a developed nation.

For example, we are taught about slavery and the genocide of Native Americans in primary school. We dedicate an entire month to Black History because we are acutely aware of our status as one of the most institutionally racist countries on the planet. We have impasses at the highest levels of government over dealing with our failure to control healthcare costs, and that is something that many Americans are cognizant of. We are repeatedly informed of our failure to create a stable market economy. I can go on.

Please leave your preconceptions at the door when having a serious discussion.

[grecy]

Nothing I said was an argument, I was only stating my opinion.

An opinion, it seems, that is not uncommon.

http://blogs.reuters.com/bernddebusmann/2011/10/28/america-w...

> Please leave your preconceptions at the door when having a serious discussion.

Upon arriving in America in 2003, I had no preconceptions. I'm speaking from my experiences living and working in the country.

[tadfisher]

I can tell you that your experience will be vastly different depending on where you live and work. That's why it's hard to make meaningful statements about America as a whole, such as "Americans think they are number 1" or "You're more likely to get murdered if you move to America". Nobody throws a dart on a map and moves to America the country, they move to California or Virgina or Wisconsin.

Your supporting evidence cited a Fox News poll, which is probably the most biased and self-selecting demographic I can think of. That's one of our well-publicized failings, actually--the inherent biases of corporate media and the echo chamber of politics.

[pessimizer]

>I can tell you that your experience will be vastly different depending on where you live and work.

I'm not sure how this makes the US different from the countries it's being compared to. They all have more and less dangerous regions. There are more and less dangerous regions within a block's walk from me, but the average over that area gives me a general basis of comparison with other areas.

I always feel that there's a racial subtext to this kind of defense of US statistics (which I often hear in terms of education, crime, and health outcomes.) It is, basically, that the parts of the US that the average Scandinavian or Japanese citizen would ever be in have comparable rates of terribleness to their own countries - just ignore the massive portion of the US behind the curtain.

e.g. I am more likely to be killed when moving to an average Chicago from an average Finland. Since Chicago is segregated, however, very few white people would ever see an average Chicago - so an average Chicago can't be a meaningful comparison.

[tadfisher]

> I always feel that there's a racial subtext to this kind of defense of US statistics (which I often hear in terms of education, crime, and health outcomes.)

There is, and that is a characteristic of the United States in general of which most who live there are keenly aware. This is why they speak quickly against comparisons of the United States as a whole against Scandinavian countries or Japan. Those countries do not have the ethnic heterogeneity or deep-seated institutional racism that the United States has experienced and still experiences.

For example, my state sterilized violent criminals and the mentally disabled until the 1980s, most of them being ethnic minorities. This would be unthinkable in Sweden, for example.

We also have easy access to guns and a destabilized internal culture in ethnically-heterogeneous areas, where community respect is a factor of how much crime you have committed or how many people you have killed.

You are exactly right, however, in that living in an upper-class neighborhood in Chicago would skew your perspective of crime in America.

[smsm42]

When talking about murder statistics, you can't be speaking from experience, can you?

The truth is that there are some very nice places in America, and some not very nice places. In the nice places, statistics is good or better than a developed country, in the not nice places, statistics is worth - because these places are nothing like developed country. While they are inside the borders of the USA, their life is very different from the life of the nice places. Smaller countries frequently do not have such diversity, and averages can be deceptive (when Bill Gates walks into a bar, average wealth of the bar patron raises significantly, even though nobody really got any richer).

[flyinRyan]

Developed countries don't normally have this kind of economic diversity. It's pretty common in developing nations though, with similar results.

[flyinRyan]

Very well, but next time you want to talk about the world's largest economy just keep this in mind.