America Is Not the Greatest Country on Earth. It’s No. 28 | Hacker News Reader

America Is Not the Greatest Country on Earth. It’s No. 28

bloomberg.com

44 pointsimartin2k66 comments

Reminds me of a Michael Parenti speech on "Superpatriotism" from 1988. There's no existing transcript I can find so I may be the first to do this:

"The superpatriots love of country seems predicated on the country being 'up there', stronger and superior to other countries.

What happens if it's gonna slip? What about people from ... lesser lands? What about somebody from...Luxembourg. I mean now, Luxembourg is #122, just barely ahead of San Marino in its military might.

So what does someone from Luxembourg do? Do they go around shame-faced? Do people tease them, "Are you from Luxembourg?", "No no, I'm uh...French". And you say, "Do you love your country" and they say "well wha..what is there to love ... I mean a few border police, no army, no navy ..."

Here's the mp3: http://9ol.es/luxembourg.mp3

The entire speech: http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/23514

Why people only rip on Americans for being patriotic? Nobody rips on the French when they say they have the best {food, fashion, history, literature, country, *}. Everybody seems fine with European snobbery in all its variants: French, Italian, and even English snobbery is accepted, but not quite as much as the others it seems.

"Nobody rips on the French when they say they have the best."

Everybody does, it is called "chauvinism". There is nothing wrong believing your country is the best, provided that you have actually traveled to other countries and know it is a fact. You will find your country being the best "at something", but could learn and improve a lot from other countries as well.

The problem with chauvinism is not understanding other countries(not knowing other cultures or countries) making yourself prejudices that are not real, and the mass of people being easily manipulated by the power establishment.

Given that the US has the biggest army in the world, with nuclear subs, nuclear missiles, drones and stuff, American prejudices are extremely important for the rest of the world.

For people living in Libya or Syria, Afghanistan , Iran or Saudi Arabia, American prejudices and actions could be the difference between being alive or dead, for you and your family, abandoning your country as a refugee with nothing or having everything you have destroyed.

When people in charge want the gross of the people to support an invasion of a foreign county and make a big business with the natural resources, they use patriotism as the main tool(e.g Americans were "being Attacked" in Iraq because 20 people from Saudi Arabia hijacked Americans planes).

> There is nothing wrong believing your country is the best, provided that you have actually traveled to other countries and know it is a fact.

Yes, there is. No single country can be "the best" or "the greatest", because this term is ridiculously underdefined. (The same fallacy applies to the submission, btw.)

I suppose you are American living in America, because, you would be from another country and living abroad (I am French and used to live in the US, Denmark and for the past 10+ years in Germany), you would definitely see that being a bit patriotic is fine and was always fine.

The problem is being patriotic to the point you cannot see outside of your bubble. If you start to be snob, in Europe at least, your friends and colleagues will quickly be sarcastic with you. And this is fine, because we do not have a safe spaces mentality.

As a German I probably heard an order of magnitude more (friendly) mocking of the French then of the US-Americans in my life. In fact, I wasn't really (conciously) aware that American exceptionalism was even a thing before I visited the first time. This year Turkish nationalism is a high-profile topic in the media. The US equivalent is only mentioned in passing (if at all) when it comes to the upcoming election.

But by frequenting English websites mainly targeted at an US audience you wouldn't know. Naturally the US is going to be a frequent topic there.

> Everybody seems fine with European snobbery

That's simply not true. The French, for example, are often seen as arrogant by other Europeans. Also, sometimes their view of being "la grande nation" is ridiculed. Generally, the more snobbish someone behaves, the easier it is to make fun of that.

Have any empirical evidence? (I'm questioning the veracity of your observation).

When traveling in the US, I'm always amused at the reactions of disbelief, horror, aggression, and utter incredulity when I propose that their country isn't the greatest in the world.

After all, they likely hear or are told every day that they are not only "free" (unlike everywhere else?) but the "greatest".

Really? What kind of people are you talking to? Note that Bloomberg, the source of the above news, is American. Note that the reaction you get might not only stem from the message itself, but also from the way you deliver it. How do you react when a foreigner critizes your country out of the blue? Imagine someone saying to you: "Your people regularily mistreat immigrants, did you know that?" How do you react?

> Imagine someone saying to you: "Your people regularily mistreat immigrants, did you know that?" How do you react?

"I know, right?"

"The U.S. is No. 64 in the rate of mothers dying for every 100,000 births, and No. 40 when it comes to the rate children under age five die."

That is shameful for the tenth richest country in the world (per capita).

The real shame in that number is that other countries literally let premature babies die without intervention so they can keep their health costs down and infant mortality numbers down too while the US aggressively intervenes and reports all births massively inflating our infant mortality numbers.

Basically, if you are going to be a premature baby, you would much rather be born in the US than any other country in the world.

The first of the numbers (rate of mothers dying) would not be affected at all by what you mention, and the second (rate of children under age of 5 dying), while affected by infant mortality (number of deaths of infants under 1 year old), is a much wider metric, so the effect is also relatively small.

Either way, I'd be interested in seeing some sources for those claims, as it's the first I've heard of it happening, at least in the developed world. And I mean it sincerely, since it's a topic of interest to me.

Doctors stand by as babies perish because they're concerned about their nation's WHO rankings? Citation needed.

I'd say its is more of an institutional bias again costs and perception that drive policies that prevent intervention when babies are born too young or too underweight. That's how the you get the horror stories of "my baby was born X days too early/Y pounds too underweight and they refused to do anything."

I've literally never heard any such story. Online or in my circles.

Again, [citation needed].

Data, or it didn't happen.

I was born over eight weeks premature, in 1989, in South Africa.

I got lucky, sure. But "any other country" letting premature babies die without intervention is perhaps too broad a claim.

My daughter was born 8 weeks premature in Germany. She was considered an extremely unproblematic case (though without medical attention, she probably wouldn't have made it).

On the same ward, we had at least one 700 gram baby that was doing fine, and several that were close to that. So agree, the parent's claim is definitely way too broad.

I never accepted America as "greatest country in the world" as a literal truth, anymore than I would say my Dad is "the greatest in the world" and expect anyone to believe it. It's a statement of love, or belonging, or some other sentiment, but some set up its literal interpretation as a strawman and begin wailing on it.

Bingo.

Hands up - who'd rather be in Iceland than the US?

Me. Iceland is awesome.

Not only that, your vote actually counts with only 331,778 people!

You mean like in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV_O3BA5e28 ?

I would. Iceland is beautiful.

I thought it was interesting that according to their numbers the U.S. has fewer homicides than Germany (which is worse than Syria?!). That's quite surprising.

The graphs are a bit confusing. higher = better, actually (there is a small bit saying "safe levels/ unsafe levels" above the 1st graph). I was also confused why Saudia Arabia would have such high issues with alcohol, whereas in fact it is Russia that does...

I'd say they're more than a little confusing. Why would anybody from a western cultural background choose yellowish orange for "better" and a range of blues for "worse"?

Heatmaps are pretty common in western culture.

Heatmaps are used with continuous data. This map has 4 discrete values, so it's really misleading.

The graphics are completely messed up in my opinion, I was trying to make sense of them exactly because of that (Germany having the worst place in "Fatalities per 100k pop." in War? Saudi Arabia drinking like crazy?) and I have a background in Statistics...

> Good performer: War (fatalities per 100k population): Germany 100

What does that mean?

Those graphs are very misleading. They rank countries from the first (left) to the last (right) for each indicator. Some indicators are such that left is better (hygiene), other are left is worse (war fatalities).

That 100 means that Germany is the 100th on war fatalities. But not! To add confusion to confusion, the number is the position of the USA on the scale. So it's the USA to be at position 100. Germany appears to be in the upper 90s.

Edit: they mislead me too. Check mnc's reply.

Germany is 100. The US is 100. France weirdly is listed as 22.

That's target 16.1.2, listed as War, shown here: http://www.thelancet.com/cms/attachment/2065481409/206635003...

That makes much more sense!

I am afraid they misled you too.

There is no ranking. 0 is "unsafe level" while 100 is "safe level".

Yup, they did!

I did not mention the higher = better. I was wondering how can Russia be so great at handling unsafe drinking!

It feels wrong. The US is remarkably violent. UNODC says the rate of homicide in the US is 3.9 per 100,000, and for Germany is 0.9 per 100,000 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

I think Bloomberg took numbers from here: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

> Performance of the health-related SDG index, MDG index, and non-MDG index, and 33 individual health-related indicators, by country, 2015

> Countries are ranked by their health-related SDG index from highest to lowest. Indicators have been scaled from 0 to 100. Definitions of health-related SDG indicators are shown in table 1. SDG=Sustainable Development Goal. MDG=Millennium Development Goal. MMR=maternal mortality ratio. SBA=skilled birth attendance. Mort=mortality. NN mort=neonatal mortality. NTDs=neglected tropical diseases. NCDs=non-communicable diseases. FP need met, mod=family planning need met, modern contraception. Adol=adolescent. UHC=universal health coverage. Air poll mort=mortality attributable to air pollution. WaSH=water, sanitation, and hygiene. IPV=intimate partner violence. HH air poll=household air pollution. Occ risk burden=burden attributable to occupational risks. PM2·5=fine particulate matter smaller than 2·5 μm.

They put that into a chart here: http://www.thelancet.com/cms/attachment/2065481409/206635003...

In that chart US is labled as 42, and Germany is labled as 81. I suspect Bloomberg made an error.

Did the UN report actually set out to rank countries by order of "greatness" or was that the mass media's contribution? The compilers of the report probably stated something like "based on criteria x,y and z which are based on data we obtained from organizations 1,2 and 3, or their equivalents, in countries around the world we ranked these countries from 1 to 100 (or whatever) according to their scores".

So...being #28 in the list doesn't mean that country is the 28th "greatest" country in the world. Obviously there exists no objective definition of "greatest" or "best" country/city/region in the world but every time I see that written somewhere I cringe a little. It could be my inner pedant but it's also because I know somebody will take this as meaning the researchers meant x country is THE greatest in the world and argue why this is, or is not, the case. Probably not so much on HN but preventative measures have been taken just in case.

Fun fact: America is not a country

Agreed. However this is something that most of the world (aside from Mexico, Central, and South America) collude in. I try to say "the US" in conversations with my European friends, but they will always just say "America" in response. And of course, there is no English equivalent to Estadounidense.

The French language has "États-Unien" [0] but it is almost never used.

[0] https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%89tats-Unien

Of course, even that _could_ be ambiguous given that my homeland's southern neighbor is officially "Estados Unidos Mexicanos" (Mexican United States). That usage is so rare as to be pretty much irrelevant, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico

Although there is a lot of local variation, after all America is the third most highly populated country in the world, I would broadly agree with this picture.

So? Is it about time someone makes it great again?

Again implies it was great at some point, (or greater then it is now).

At what point, exactly, was the US "Great"? Was it when Women couldn't vote? Was it when black people couldn't sit in the "white people" part of the bus? Was it when you could get committed to a mental institution just for being gay?

While there are many things wrong now, the rosy past that such rhetoric seems to assume exists was never a thing. America was never great.

Great relative to others, not perfect.

For one of the youngest countries on Earth, the US is (maybe because of that) all too opposed to change.

The US constitution was written over 200 years ago. Other countries were founded many hundreds or thousands of years before that, and have thus realized that the core principles they were founded on were maybe not all applicable today, and continually update their laws and government.

The problem with "the greatest country on Earth" is that it's unwilling to adapt and learn and grow. Which is what every other country and human on Earth tries to daily.

It should be metioned that the process of statistical data collection can vary between countries.

But it is #1 in military might. So, its the greatest

...as evidenced by their numerous successes whenever they have intervened in outside theaters for the past 50 years... ?

you did not finish your sentence. Please allow me to correct. ---- But it is #1 in military might. So, its the greatest in military might.

I would assume "greatest" should be measure by more than one dimension. I think we can agree that Muhammad Ali was the greatest boxer in the world, if he would have been slow or small despite having a killer punch one can argue he would not have been the greatest.

It's a shame they had to funnel the apostrophe budget to the military, though.

Mightiest is not necessarily greatest.

History would suggest otherwise.

Really? The Mongols were fearsomely mighty, yet their empire lasted less than a hundred years and their culture spread nowhere. The USSR was a military superpower, yet it only lasted one human's lifetime, and it absolutely sucked to live there. Alexander the Great was stupendously powerful in a military sense, 'conquering the known world', yet his realms collapsed upon his death at only 33.

I'm so sick of these articles:

1- poverty is defined differently in each country

2- so is infant mortality

3- so is life expectancy (who gets included isn't the same)

4- social justice issues have no clear definition

5- some of these stats aren't even quantifyable, such as hygiene.

...

How much is a percentage of obesity worth? As much as percent of GDP? Or why isn't the number of top 100 universities accounted for?

can keep going and going...

These are political rankings given the veneer of rigor because they have numbers attached to them. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are just busy work for the Social Justice Warriors with nothing else to do but make up yet another meaningless utopian index.

https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs

Some indicators could be subjective but how can infant mortality and life expectancy be defined differently in different countries?

> However, the method of calculating IMR often varies widely between countries, and is based on how they define a live birth and how many premature infants are born in the country.

> Many countries, however, including certain European states (e.g. France) and Japan, only count as live births cases where an infant breathes at birth, which makes their reported IMR numbers somewhat lower

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality#Differences_i...

edit: other response is admittedly a lot better

Who is "born" is defined different depending on which country. E.g., most European countries will not count premature babies if they don't make certain weight or other metrics and no attempt to intervene, so this sets up some really perverse incentives. These can make up more than 3 out of every 4 premature births so it can significantly tilt the stats:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/276952/infant-mortalit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality

> ... most European countries will not count premature babies if they don't make certain weight

Factually incorrect, as shown by your own link which lists 6 countries that have weight/gestation thresholds. Or maybe there are less than 12 countries in Europe, who the hell cares, right?

You trimmed the rest of the sentence that said "or other metrics" that would include things like weeks premature. That clearly changes the meaning the sentence. But that's a minor thing when you are playing a game of Gotha, isn't it.

> ...That clearly changes the meaning the sentence

If you look at my reply I talk about gestation period.

Only 6 European countries have thresholds for either gestation or weight.

You can accuse me of playing "gotcha" if you like, but you're misrepresenting data and it's fair for me to correct you.

[Edited for typo]

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