Sure, it's the largest by GDP, but how much of that GDP is filtering down to the regular people? Are Americans, on average happier and have better life outcomes than other developed nations?
An absolutely insane amount. It's ridiculous just how wealthy and the quality of life the average American has compared to the world.
> Are Americans, on average happier and have better life outcomes than other developed nations?
Yeah for the most part they are in the same ballpark.
I've been there last year. This is absolutely not true compared to Europe, including post-soviet states. Might have been true a few decades back maybe. Of course, we can argue that the US citizens have it made compared to someone in Kenya (do they?) but that's not the spirit of the question, is it?
Is there another country that comes close?
Sure, if you're from say, Haiti, even the US will look very attractive, but the bar is pretty low there, wouldn't you say?
(e.g. backing and installing dictatorships[1], contributing massively to climate change, ...)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_of_Chile
In fairness the same has happened in the US recently.
I suspect that when you bring a competitive attitude into every aspect of life it limits how much you're willing to invest in systems that don't seem to give you an individual advantage. Americans are much more against single payer healthcare, or investing in public transit, or other forms of social support than their peer (or "near-peer", to use the government's preferred term) nations.
It almost feels like a comedic extrapolation of the classic sports-team movie arc: Sure, it's possible to create a team that prizes winning above all else, but is winning all that's worthwhile at the end of the day?
In hindsight, I would definitely declare today that we WERE winning it when we were fighting it. Now that we don't, we're getting massacred.
LOL, no, we've never even been in a winning position. Were we winning when the CIA used cocaine to finance weapons for Iran? I guess we were winning when we put a lot of black people in jail for decades for possessing crack while white wall street folks were getting slaps on the wrist for getting caught with the same amount of coke? Our country having the highest percentage of people in prison sounds like we were winning too. Lots of winning.
Imagine the strength of the cartels with 10-20x the customer base and far more frequent usage among them.
The targeted term must be something that is clearly human made, something that sounds undeniably bad and something that is easily understood by everyone at first glance:
_War on Pollution_
Nature is good, pollution is bad. People who pollute are _obviously bad_ and they do bad things. Pollution is wasteful and ugly. Yuck!
Also it's more general than climate change. Ocean plastic is also bad. Chemical, electronic and light pollution etc.
The people who think of chemtrails and 5g waves. They really hate pollution so much, they see it everywhere. Give them a war that they can join in.
From slavery to oil to silicon, exploitation is what America has always been good at.
AI genuinely is that big of a deal. If any economic sector deserves this sensationalism, it's this.