Is America the greatest country in the world? It is easy to give an affirmative answer. Any other answer would cost you votes if you are running for a political office. But I think the answer must be defensible and that’s what I’ll try to do here.
First, I think this epoch in history is the best. It might have been great to be the king in the 18th century but for everyone else life was horrible. I would not want to go back to outhouses, no useful medicine, various plagues, no television, no Internet, etc. So we don’t have to compare America to countries in earlier times.
Second, we have to have metrics, things that we can measure. I think we can find metrics but for what? I propose we look at the daily newspaper for categories to look at. The front page of the newspaper is often bad news (“If it bleeds it leads”). This includes war and other calamities. Just looking at war, what other country has a bigger military? No one is even close. Maybe that’s not a good thing, maybe it’s a flat out bad thing, but when it comes to war no other country comes close. The metric we can use is the defense budget of all major countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
The spending for 2017 is 610 billion. Next is China at only 228 billion and no other country is more than 70 billion.
What other sections of the newspaper appear on a daily basis? Sports! The easiest metric that I can think of for sports is the Olympic medal count. An immediate objection to this and other metrics is that it is skewed by the mere size of the countries that we are comparing. However we are trying to answer the question is America the greatest country and, I would argue, its size is part of its greatness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_table
More than 200 countries have participated in the modern Olympics and more than 70 have never won a single medal. If we looked at only the Winter games then Norway would be the leader with the U.S. in second place. As of 2019, the United States has a total of 2827 medals for both the Summer and Winter Olympics. The Soviet Union has 1204 and that number appears to be static. Adding Soviet Union medals to Russian and “Unified Team” medals gives a total of 1910. The total medal count for Germany including East Germany is 1754. Even looking at recent games, the U.S. won the medal count in 2016 as well as the most gold medals, most silver medals, and most bronze medals.
What other sections from the newspaper show up almost every day? Business. It hardly seems necessary to show that the U.S. has the strongest economy but lately you may have heard that we are slipping. The easiest metric is GDP, gross domestic product. The U.S. has been the largest economy in the world since 1871. In 2018 China’s GDP was 62% of the U.S. GDP but the gap is closing. A version of the GDP based on purchasing power (PPP) actually puts China ahead of the U.S. Above I wrote that we would not compare based on a per capita basis because being bigger is part of being better. But consider GDP(PPP) per capita when comparing China and the U.S. because that affects how a citizen feels about their life.
https://www.investopedia.com/insights/worlds-top-economies/
The U.S. is not number 1 but the countries that are in the top 10 include Qatar, Luxembourg, UAE. Not the countries we would use for an economic comparison. The U.S. ranks #10 using 2018 data from the IMF. China is #73. This puts China lower than Saint Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, and Equatorial Guinea. I claim this puts the U.S. in the lead in the category of economics.
There isn’t a separate part of the newspaper for science but I wish there was. We can compare countries based on Nobel prize winners. This includes prizes for Economics and the Peace Prize as well as science prize winners. The United States has 375 winners, the runnerup is the U.K. which has 129 Nobels (as of May 2019 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country ).
Are there other metrics we could use to determine the best country in the world. The Happiness scores put the U.S. in the top 20 but not much better than that. This metric is based on GDP per capita, social support, life expectancy, and a few other metrics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
Despite having the strongest military, the biggest economy, great scientists and excellent athletes, the U.S. is disappointing to those who want to say the U.S. is best but how much weight do you give the World Happiness Report. One of the metrics is “Perceptions of corruption” and the U.S. is having a tough time with that one lately.
So I leave you with a bit of a downer. Like a school report card, we are #1 in our class but we do have things to work on. What does this have to do with atheism? Nothing, for now.
