http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/07/news/economy/issa-poor/index.html?iid=HP_LN
I look at it this way. We sell our nation's brand as America, the Greatest Country on Earth. Nobody is more free! Nobody has more opportunity! Nobody has a higher quality of life!
And that's great, if we can live up to that. But the problem is that the people trying to sell this idea don't compare the US to the best places in the world, they compare the US to the worst places in the world.
"The US is great! If you don't like it, try living in North Korea!" Well yeah, North Korea sucks. Nobody's disputing that. But people'd rather live in South Korea than North Korea. People would rather live in China or Japan or even Vietnam than live in North Korea.
You can't say you're the best, and measure yourself against the worst. Because then you aren't the greatest, you're just the not-worst.
And then when you take countries with better opportunity and better wages and better education and better quality of life and better longevity and better rates of infant mortality (Scandinavian countries come to mind for all categories), and you try to use these as examples of how the US can do better, you get shut down.
"They have less people than the US! They have a more homogenous culture! You can't really compare them to the US!"
Well, that's great, but eventually that means that when you say the US is the greatest country in the world, what you mean is the US is the greatest country in the world with 300-350 million inhabitants located in North America between a country called Canada and a country called Mexico. By those standards, yeah, we're great.
Meanwhile we're knocking on India for being disease-ridden and corrupt, we're knocking on China for having a repressive government, we're knocking on both of them for not being fantastic about the environment. But India has 1.27 billion people and China has 1.4 billion people. So we can't really fairly compare them to the US, now can we? Do we know that we'd be any better than China with its population 440% the size of ours, if we had that same population?
What it all comes down to is, American exceptionalism is bupkiss. And anybody who loves their country, no matter what country it is, should constantly be striving to make their country better. Not looking at the shitty countries and saying "Meh, we're good enough."