Eden Richman Week 17 - Why America Is not the Greatest Country Ever

     This week's post is a response to Ethan's "Why America is the Greatest Country Ever!" post. link: (https://dkjalang.blogspot.com/2021/02/ethan-week-15-why-america-is-greatest.html) I want to respond to it but felt that I couldn't cover everything I wanted to say in one comment, so I am writing a blog about it instead. Before I start though, I want to be clear that I am NOT saying that America is not a great country, I am just saying that it is not the greatest. I think the reason that I disagree with Ethan is our definitions of "great" by great, I mean the best to live in. The best living standards for people, the happiness of people, etc. 

  The backbone of a country is its government, economy, and power in the world. Every great country has these three things, but it is not what makes it a great country, it is just the foundation of it. America excels in all three of these categories and has one of the strongest, if not the strongest backbone in the world. But I'm not here to talk about the country with the greatest foundation, I am here to talk about how America compares to other countries when we look past the foundation, and into the lives of everyday people in all socioeconomic levels. I will mostly be comparing America to all the other countries in the OCED (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) which is a group of 37 countries that are very developed and democratic.

    The first thing I would like to talk about is freedom. America is not the freest country according to multiple reputable sources (1)(2) While the U.S. does rank the highest in terms of speech, (3) there are so many other freedoms to take into account, such as freedom of movement, right to security, freedom of privacy, freedom of information, etc. For this reason, America is not the freest country in the world. Another right that many people in America don't have is the right to have accessible healthcare. The U.S. is the only country in the developed world without universal healthcare. (4) We do have systems in place such as Medicaid and Medicare, but even with Medicaid, Americans who are not poor enough for it, but not rich enough for insurance are left uninsured. I understand that universal health care is not objectively a good thing, but having healthcare is; All people in all of the other 1st world countries have access to healthcare, unlike Americans. One of the results of lack of healthcare and knowledge of health is obesity. The U.S. is the 12th most obese country in the world, with an adult obesity rate of 36.2% (5)

    The cost of healthcare also plays a role in the amount of people we have in poverty. Although our poverty line compared to most other countries poverty lines is higher, we are still the richest country in the OECD. A poverty line is calculated by the median of household incomes in a country, so while America's poor people are richer than other countries poor people, we still have more poor people. It is a good place to live as a poor person, but the fact that we have the highest poverty rate in the OECD (6) means that we as a country are not doing something right.  As an example of one thing that is putting us in this position is lack of welfare. (view graph on the right) As you can see, compared to multiple OECD countries, the U.S. does not give nearly as much welfare benefits as others countries that are developed.

    The last and maybe most important thing I want to talk about is happiness. If I was only allowed to look at one ranking of countries to decide which one to live in, I would choose to look at a happiness ranking. Good thing that the U.N. created the World Happieness Report. They survey people from all across the world and use many different things to find out which country is the "happiest" America ranks pretty high in the WHR, #18 (7) It is pretty good, but not the best. 

    America is an amazing place to live, and I am very grateful to live not only in this country but also in a good neighborhood living a privileged life. Every single person has their different defenition of what makes a country great, and if I shared the same defenition as Ethan, then I think we might agree that America is the greatest country ever. But in my opinion, America is a great amazing country, but I can't say that it is the greatest.

 

(1) https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index/2020

(2) https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-most-freedom-in-the-world-2018-4#its-worth-noting-that-   the-us-was-ranked-58th-28

(3)https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/freedom-of-speech-country-comparison/

(4)https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/04/26/america-is-a-health-care-outlier-in-the-developed-world

(5)https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-rates-by-country

(6)https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm

(7)https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/social-environments-for-world-happiness/