Sorry, President Putin, But Data Shows America Actually Is Exceptional [View all]

[bunnies]

Sorry, President Putin, But Data Shows America Actually Is Exceptional

(snip)

I’m not a nationalistic person. In fact I have an instinctive dislike of nationalism or basically any team mentality towards groups whose achievements one has not significantly contributed towards. Individualism and cosmopolitanism tend to describe how I see the world. So I certainly agree with Putin that most people should certainly see their nations as less exceptional than they currently do. So yes, there is far too much nationalism overall, and in this country for sure. Yet despite my dislike of nationalism and agreement with Putin that we should all keep our group pride in check, I can’t help but see America as objectively exceptional.

(snip)

So how would an economist decide how exceptional a country is? Revealed preference of individuals, of course. Look to where people actually choose to live when they have that choice. The problem with this is that people aren’t generally free to move wherever they want due to global immigration restrictions. Still, I think we can learn a lot about exceptionalism by looking at individual stated preferences, which doesn’t suffer from the weighting problem of creating an index using some aggregation of measured outcomes. This measure tells us what people really value and how much instead of what the index creator thinks people value and can measure.

The question then is: if people were free to move anywhere, where would they want to live? Gallup’s 2013 poll on this shows that more than anywhere else, people want to move to the U.S.



While people may (and should) argue all they want about whether income inequality is too high, economic freedom is too low, the healthcare and public school systems are too expensive and low productivity, and whatever else they do or don’t like about America, the fact remains that 138 million people want to move here. That’s more than triple the next most popular destination, the U.K. So whatever pundits think about America, it still looks pretty exceptional according to the individual preferences of people all over the world.

more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2013/09/12/american-exceptionalism/

editing to clarify for those who cant tell. I did NOT write the article. I thought it was interesting and posted it for discussion. Anyone thinking this is some rah rah USA shit, is wrong.

editing again: I did not mean to argue for American Exceptionalism as a concept used by the RW. I took the word "exceptional" at its face value and was not aware of the line of thinking American Exceptionalism entailed. Yes, I feel stupid for not knowing the difference. But Im leaving this post to own it. Crow eaten.