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America the ‘Just OK’
Stallone Laurel Dias, originally from India and a soldier in the US Army, takes the oath to become a US citizen during a ceremony in Boston.
Yet America is “just OK,” says The New York Times in a transparent attempt at contrarian Independence Day clickbait. But compared to whom? Other rich nations, apparently. They have lower poverty rates, educate their kids better, and get more bang for their healthcare buck. Journalists Taige Jensen and Nayeema Raza conclude “the myth of America as the greatest nation on earth is at best outdated and at worst, wildly inaccurate.” The United States has “more in common with ‘developing countries’ than we’d like to admit.”
Now I haven’t heard such America bashing since Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign or maybe last week’s Democratic debates. But rather than pick apart or give added context to Jensen’s and Raza’s statistics (I’m not sure why an open, diverse, continent-spanning nation of more than 300 million should be compared to boutique countries such as Luxembourg, Switzerland, or the Nordics. And, for instance, the stuff about poverty rates is sloppy: conflating overall poverty with child poverty and ignoring very low consumption poverty rates. Too much dodgy data), I’d like to approach the issue from a different direction and perspective. Instead of viewing “great” as meaning “best in all categories and topping league tables in everything,” think of it as meaning “exceptional” or “indispensable.”
Or as economists Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, and Thierry Verdier explain in their paper “Can’t We All Be More Like Scandinavians?”: We cannot all be like the Scandinavians, because Scandinavian capitalism depends in part on the knowledge spillovers created by the more cutthroat American capitalism … Some countries will opt for a type of cutthroat capitalism that generates greater inequality and more innovation and will become the technology leaders, while others will free-ride on the cutthroat incentives of the leaders and choose a more cuddly form of capitalism.
Sounds like America is still a pretty special place. And let’s be honest: America is not only the straw that stirs the drink, it’s what keeps this whole planetary mishigash working as well as it does. I’m reminded of the alternate history series “After America” where a mysterious energy wave disappears most of the USA. Almost immediately, as the book’s description aptly puts it, “the forces of order and anarchy wage all-out war for postapocalyptic dominance.” Not an unreasonable prediction.
But despite all of the above, I wish we’d act like America really is just “OK” and aspire to even greater things as the world’s model of democratic capitalism done right. Properly valuing our many achievements doesn’t mean resting on our laurels.
Published in General
The New York Times is simply agreeing with President Trump.
After all, if America is great there would be no need to Make America Great Again.
And that importing third worlders makes us more third-world-like.
And a glaring obvious that P sidesteps is that we are far larger and far more diverse than the “boutique” countries.
What a good post, except that Mr. Pethokoukis couldn’t resist this dig against President Trump.
President Trump never bashed America. He bashed a malicious Leftism that manages to be wrong about virtually everything, and a technocratic Republican elite that was out of touch with, and often dismissive of, the concerns of ordinary working-class Americans.
The President was relentlessly patriotic and pro-American. In what was otherwise a very fine post, I find Mr. Pethokoukis’s criticism of the President unfortunate.
How exactly are the Swiss going to export their chocolate and watches to the North Koreans and the Danish their Legos to Brazil, without someone ensuring freedom of the seas?
Plus we landed on the moon. Sure that was 50 years ago, but that just means the rest of the world has had half a century to replicate the feat. Get back to me when those supposedly superior Scandinavian countries have planted their flag on the lunar surface.
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