I was reflecting on the fact that about one week from today I had planned to be landing in Lisbon, Portugal to begin a month-long exploration of the country to see if it might be a place I’d like to move for an extended period of time. I cancelled the trip because of COVID and plan to regroup and try again in the spring. Hopefully things will look a little better then and I will have had my booster shot by then as well for an extra layer of protection.
I’m sure there are those who would ask, “Why would you want to do that? This is America and we have the best of everything.” My response is twofold. First of all, I like seeing, exploring and experiencing new places and cultures. I have been fortunate enough to have travelled to a wide variety of countries around the world and have lived abroad twice – once in France and once in Kuwait. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I think it’s a provably false assertion that the United States has the best of everything.
I think this country could benefit greatly from looking at what some other countries are doing in certain areas and doing a little self-reflection. Unfortunately, a great many Americans and American politicians suffer from the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome. The most glaring example is the metric system. There are only three countries in the world that don’t use the metric system – the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia. This is why when so many Americans go abroad, they often get totally flustered when they see road signs in kilometers, fuel sold by the liter, and packages in the supermarkets labelled in grams and kilograms.
Never mind that the metric system makes much more sense and is much easier to use and understand once learned. In 1975, the United States passed the Metric Conversion Act which was meant to slowly switch America over to the metric system to be in sync with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, it was completely voluntary (once again because of a lack of political courage) and failed miserably. So, here we are some 46 years later and we are still out of sync with the rest of the world. We could switch to the metric system. But we won’t.
People would certainly argue that whether or not we use the metric system is really inconsequential. Perhaps. But there are other areas that we can look at and ask a lot of ‘why?’ questions. Why can other countries do this and we can’t? Yesterday I talked about the proliferation of firearms in this country where gun ownership far exceeds that in any other country on the planet – and yet we rank 122 on the Global Safety Index. Mass shootings and gun deaths continue to increase. A reasonable person might be tempted to ask, “What are other countries that are far safer than America and have far fewer gun deaths doing?” But we won’t.
The United States, in spite of having vaccines widely available, has the highest number of COVID deaths in the world!!! THE WORLD!! One might be tempted to ask, “What are other countries doing that seems to be more effective against this pandemic than we are doing?” But we won’t.
Since 2002, an annual report looking at ‘happiness’ has been published. It looks at countries across six dimensions: Gross Domestic Product per Capita; Social Support; Health Life Expectancy; Freedom to Make Your Own Life Choices; Generosity of the General Population; Perceptions of Internal and External Corruptions Levels. The top ten countries are Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Austria, Luxembourg and Canada comes in at 11. In spite of the United States huge Gross Domestic Product, we still only rank 18th.
Interestingly enough, and really not all that surprising, there are no authoritarian governments in the ‘above average’ rankings. And almost all of the countries in the top ten are European and are countries that have relatively high taxes, broad social support, relatively small wealth disparity and widely available affordable medical care. Again, one might be tempted to ask, “What are these countries doing that makes their populations so ‘happy’? And, are there things that the United States could emulate or tailor to our country to improve the ‘happiness’ of the population of this country?” But we won’t.
There is no doubt that the United States has some of the best universities in the world. However, our overall education system ranks 20th in the world. The top ten are: Finland, Japan, South Korea, Denmark, RUSSIA, Norway, UK, Israel, Sweden, Hong Kong. One might be tempted to ask, “What makes the education systems in these countries so good? Is there something that we could adapt to our country to make our overall education systems better?” But we won’t.
America has become so arrogant, self-centered, polarized and so consumed with internal squabbling and jockeying for power that we are incapable of self-reflection and being willing to potentially learn from other countries, let alone deal with some of the major existential problems of the day like climate change. I think ancient Rome was on a similar trajectory. It didn’t end very well for them. I wonder what will become of us.