STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Friday, 30 October 2015

[Demeter]

18. American Exceptionalism: You can find it everywhere but in the country-comparison statistics

Sources: CDC/NCHS, linked birth/infant death data set (U.S. data); OECD 2014 (all other data); Infographic: Erik Vrielink

Infant mortality rate, 2010: This revealing measure is a good proxy for overall quality of life. It is therefore telling that the United States comes in 26th, well below Greece, whose financial troubles recently have put it in the headlines.

Belief in “American exceptionalism”—that unique blend of ideals, ideas, and love of liberty made so powerful by great technical and economic accomplishments—is alive and well. Even President Obama, a reluctant endorser to begin with, has come around. Early in his presidency (in April 2009), he affirmed his belief by essentially denying it: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” By May of 2014, he had relented: “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”

But such proclamations mean nothing if they cannot stand up to the facts. And here what really matters is not the size of a country’s gross domestic product or the number of warheads or patents it may possess but the variables that truly capture its physical well-being and educational standard. These variables are simply life, death, and knowledge.

Infant mortality is an excellent proxy for a wide range of conditions including income, quality of housing, nutrition, education, and investment in health care. Very few babies die in those affluent countries where people live in good housing and well-educated parents (themselves well nourished) feed them properly and have access to medical care. How does the United States rank among the world’s roughly 200 nations? The latest available comparison (for 2010) shows that with 6.1 of every 1,000 live-born babies dying in the first year of life, the United States does not figure among the top 25 nations. Its infant mortality is far higher than in France (3.6), Germany (3.4), and Japan (2.3). And the U.S. rate was 60 percent higher than in Greece, a country portrayed in the press as an utter basket case.

Excusing that very poor rating by saying that the European countries have homogeneous populations does not work: Modern France and Germany are full of recent immigrants (just spend some time in Marseille or Düsseldorf). What matters more is parental knowledge, good nutrition, the extent of economic inequality, and access to universal health care, the United States being (notoriously) the only modern affluent country without the latter...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/american-exceptionalism

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