How different is America from the rest of the developed world

[Alolan_Apples]

A few months ago, Donald Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. Back then, just Syria, Nicaragua, and the US were the only countries to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Just recently, Syria joined the agreement as Nicaragua joined a few weeks ago. Now the United States is the only country in the world to have withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. And this is over job creation.

This isn’t the first time the United States alienates itself from the rest of the world. In fact, there’s a lot of things America differs from the rest of the developed world, probably from the rest of the world as well. Despite being the most powerful nation in the world, having a man land on the moon first, and being the center of innovation for modern technology, we are behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to social progresses and human development. This article best explains how America is still behind the rest of the world. It may be outdated by over three years due to stat changes, but boy, that explains a lot. They are also behind the developed world on gender equality, abortion rights and funding, mandated and paid vacation days, and multilingual population. But does that mean America is a bad country? No, but it’s true that we are behind in these fields while being ahead of the rest of the world on innovation.

Other than being behind the rest of the world, they have a lot of other norms that do not comply with the rest of the world. Here are a few examples:

• #1 - Religion and Society: There is a trend that shows that the richer and more developed countries are more secular or atheist whereas the poorer and less developed countries are more religious. The United States is an oddball in this trend. We are one of the richer and more developed countries, yet we still have larger populations that not only follow a religion, but also more than half of the population believes religion plays a large role in their lives. Even our motto is “In God We Trust”.
• #2 - Voting and Elections: First of all, the United States is practically the only country in the world that still elects our leaders through the electoral college. While the rest of the world elects leaders through popular vote, the United States still uses the electoral college. The system is archaic by global standards, but there’s a reason why we still use it. State sovereignty is a traditional American value, and the elections are trying to give every state a voice. When it comes to popular vote, only a few states and the large cities determine who wins an election, as the rural areas and most states would feel ignored. That, and the Founding Fathers implemented it to keep someone unfit from taking office. We also have gerrymandering, which is why our Congress doesn’t represent the nation’s population. The rest of the world also has compulsory voting to get everyone at the voting age to vote, but the United States doesn’t have that. We don’t allow convicted felons to vote, and instead of moving towards compulsory voting, some states passed voter ID laws.
• #3 - Date Format and Units of Measurement: Another thing that remains to be archaic compared to the rest of the world is our use of measurement. The US is no stranger to the Metric System, as we use it in STEM fields, but when it comes to using it on a daily basis, we still stick with the Imperial units. We still measure in inches, feet, yards, and miles when it comes to architecture, industry, and geography. We still use ounced and pounds when it comes to weighing objects. We still use cups, pints, quarts, and gallons when it comes to cooking. We still use Fahrenheit over Celsius when it comes to cooking and measuring the weather. The units of time are still the same, but our date format reads as the month, day, and year in that order. For example: 11/07/2017 means November 7th of 2017 in the United States. But in places like Europe and Latin America, 11/07/2017 means July 11th of 2017. We still choose not to use the Metric System as a daily basis while the rest of the world abandoned the Imperial System.
• #4 - Socialism: The developed world, as well as some developing nations, are more socialist than the United States is. Not just in economics, but also society. For example, healthcare. Canada and Europe have implemented single-payer, universal healthcare, and the people are happy about it. When we even tried to implement Obamacare, which is lighter than universal healthcare when it comes to socialism, there was a huge debate on it. The politicians can’t even agree on it. They also have higher taxes and more government funding than the United States does. We aren’t even happy about socialism.

Last, but not least, I’m going over some justification on why we aren’t catching up with the rest of the world on social progresses. The United States was notorious for reporting everything. In places like Europe, when they record stats on humans, they only count those that are one year or older. The United States counts everybody, including those under a year. Incarceration rates are higher because of our ban on drugs and our lack of teaching of morals in school. Inequality is actually more of a consequence of human nature since we don’t allow discrimination anymore. And the readon why we couldn’t pass any solutions to these problem is because of our opposition towards larger and more powerful governments.