This shouldn't be surprising at all. As someone who lives in a primarily black, urban adjacent neighborhood (midtown Kansas City) for the last two years, I can't help but think that America is a place where our government prefers to help corporations and businesses over people. Here in KC we have public schools that have been de-credited, crumbling water and sewage infrastructure, and the bare minimum of public transportation. I say all this as someone who loves this country and whenever I go abroad I can't wait to get home...but there are times when I am driving through the ghetto that the thought of America as a first world country is laughable. Our government and our culture does a massive disservice to our people.<p>Edit: While there is much more to the city than the eastside, here is a neat HBO documentary about the drugs & violence in eastside KC in the 90s: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wbt16OevZc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wbt16OevZc</a>
"America leads the world when it comes to access to higher education."
If you're rich, maybe, otherwise, I doubt this holds true when compared to european countries. I'd like to see the source for this statement.
"America leads the world when it comes to access to higher education"
Is this really true? From what I hear, higher education is only available in America if you can afford it.. This is not the case in many other countries, and I'm not sure if American universities are of higher quality than for example Swedish ones (which are free for citizens).
The big problem with all these comparisons of countries is that you compare a 320 million people country (USA) with a less than 6 million people country (Denmark). It simply does not make sense, we should compare the USA with the complete EU.
seems a bit odd, you rank western countries on various things you always get, surprise, some kind of ranking and people can moan or boast about it..... in terms of the "points" difference, it's not too big comparatively. Not sure these kinds of indexes really tell the real story.
The list is questionable. UK above Austria, they cannot possibly be serious.<p>Anybody who would make a trip from Vienna to Graz and, say, Aspang am Wechsel and then would make a similar trip between London, Birmingham and, say, Battle in East Sussex would see very, very, very different levels of social development is just about any regard.
America is a continent, nowhere near a country and definitely not only the United States of America.<p>Why being picky? Because referring to, say, Europe as a unity is questionable and definitely is, were you to intend Scandinavia.
and its only going to get worse as we veto visa the best and brightest from all over the world, reverse our status as a melting pot of immigration and believe that padding blue collar american workers with the forever promise of working manual labor in manufactoring jobs because people are entitled to have the same job forever because thats how progress works ^_^<p>over bringing in the best and brightest while simultaneously making higher education affordable for americans and bolstering our public school system which is one of the worst in the world, the quality of which is entirely dependent on the average income of the neighborhood your parents live in.<p>The scariest part about having a reduced credit rating and falling into descent while having a sexist American for President is that most of the internal (I'm a United States citizen) banter I hear is the grumbling of Americans blaming our falling status on everyone else.<p>We have horrible schools<p>We are lazy on average in comparison to other higher educated European countries when it comes to educating ourselves<p>We supposedly hate CNN/Fox news but people watch it.<p>While I would not say the HN population is like this, the majority of suburban America is xenophobic even in the Northeast where people like to brag about being better than the South (I grew up in the deep South, went to college in NY and now live out West)<p>The north and the south are still deeply divided and it reflects the long standing habit of thought in this country is that we are deeply divided and unwilling to accept blame for our actions.<p>Our political system is a rock throwing party to see who is still alive and standing at the end.<p>We are second-tier country. I'll be impressed to see if we are one by the end of my lifetime.<p>The scapegoating along with the sense of entitlement so many Americans have along with the persistent ignorance and declaration that we are the best country in the world and that is a title that belongs to us forever while by every measurable metric we are not, borders along the narcissistic psychological disease of continual denial and mental evasion of the person who was voted to lead this country.