There is much about which to be sad, and angry, and depressed, and ashamed, over the past week, and year, and decade. I advocate strongly that we are best served by dealing with reality, rather than painting over problems or burying our collective heads in the sand.
However, I do this from the fundamental belief that this country is worth saving, that our outlook should ultimately remain optimistic so long as the country can be saved. As we observe Veterans' Day today, that's a reminder of much suffering for which we are responsible in our various military misadventures around the globe. At the same time, we remember that that same projection of power has been used to create one of the most stable and prosperous world orders in human history.
This is not a diatribe against other countries, or an attack on Americans who choose to live elsewhere. What I offer is a countering perspective to the underlying semantics of the concept of 'leaving America' as framed in that series of posts.
A little over 1% of the American population lives elsewhere at any given time, mostly for career purposes or to be with a family member where they have citizenship. Most American expats remain connected to the US, including politics and voting. The point that I would propose is that it's not a comparison or a competition. It's not The American Dream vs. The European Dream (whatever either of those are, in practice). My family, for example, can trace various lineages all over Europe. Ciao Toscana! Salut Paris! привет! Hallo! And of course, the Irish potato famine, or, as might be more accurately described, the English famine, but we won't get into that. It's much simpler in American-speak to simply call us all WASPs. And after all, the world is much bigger than the US and Europe.
The point is that the American dream is awesome. La France, elle est magnifigue, aussi. Mais, je préfere d'habiter á St. Louis. [Je suis désolé mes amis français pour les erreurs.]
We shouldn't get (too) down on ourselves. We deserve better than beating ourselves up over how we don't measure up to [insert superior country on some ranking here]. If you want to move to Canada, or Norway, or Switzerland, or wherever, awesome, do it. Bonne chance. Paris, je t'aime.
But it's OK to be excited about the USA, too. We have done some pretty cool things here, and there is much potential in our future. What we have done is create large amounts of wealth* for lots of people from a variety of different backgrounds. There are far more non-Americans living in America, for example, than there are American expats living elsewhere. Population growth doesn't necessary mean it's a great place to live, but it is notable people continue to come here for a better life. In fact, over 10% of American citizens today are foreign born. We have the resources (money, labor, skills, education, energy, raw materials, etc) to pursue the public policies we want to pursue; no one can tie our hands but ourselves. This is despite the worst that the Reagan-Bush era could throw at us. Ironically, one particular corporatist policy, NAFTA, actually fed the big wave of immigration we've had over the past couple decades as industrial agriculture disrupted the lives of millions of Mexicans.
What I want to offer is one particular way of looking at this courtesy of the data gathered and organized in the CIA's World Factbook.
There is something truly remarkable when you cross-reference two specific data sets. In comparing the top 25 most populous countries in the world, and the top 25 countries by per capita GDP*, there is virtually no overlap. The challenges of creating a prosperous, stable, cohesive society, and the challenges of running a large, diverse nation, are not easily addressed by the same political system.
In fact, only one nation appears on both lists - the US (#3 population, #11 GDP). And note, this isn't just because 'Europe' is broken up into multiple countries. The European Union is tracked as a whole; it's about #32 on the GDP per capita list (42 - 10 member states above the average). Or, a different way of conceptualizing this same information is to say that the US economic 'pie' is nearly as large as that of the EU, but the EU is divvying it up amongst 50% more people (as a whole, the EU would be #3 on the population list, at just under 500 million).
The American experiment has managed to create a political system capable of organizing resources on a tremendous scale. This accomplishment is particularly notable when looking at the Top Ten lists.
For GDP per capita, what these places have in common is not that they're all European (or EU members). Rather, what they have in common is that they are small and homogeneous. So let me ask a provocative question. Why isn't there discussion about leaving America for Kuwait? Or Brunei? Or Qatar? Or Singapore? Read the CIA's description of Brunei, for example.
Brunei has a small well-to-do economy that encompasses a mixture of foreign and domestic entrepreneurship, government regulation, welfare measures, and village tradition.
...
The government provides for all medical services and free education through the university level and subsidizes rice and housing. Brunei's leaders are concerned that steadily increased integration into the world economy will undermine internal social cohesion. Plans for the future include upgrading the labor force, reducing unemployment, strengthening the banking and tourist sectors, increasing agricultural production, and, in general, further widening the economic base beyond oil and gas.
The Top Ten list by population is revealing, as well.
We tend to think of countries like China and India as 'rising powers' or other similar language. But that's essentially a function of their total size. Mexico's GDP per capita is about twice that of China's. India's figure is less than neighboring Sri Lanka. Yet how many of us would view China and India as the major powers, and Mexico and Sri Lanka as the poor nations?
We Americans have some particularly embarrassing policy failures. Making medical decisions based upon ability to pay is probably what stands out the most. Our prison system is appalling, too. This is what happens when we let so much wealth and power concentrate in the hands of so few people. But what I urge is to not let specific warts make us insecure or ashamed of the overall march of progress in the most dynamic and diverse nation on the planet. Did you know, for example, that America's Medicare system was actually a model for Asian countries like Taiwan as they developed their own healthcare systems? We can be confident in our potential, wishing those Americans who wish to live elsewhere a fulfilling experience as the number of American expats just doesn't matter from a policy perspective. There is no such thing as The American Dream versus The European Dream. In the Big Picture, we're all on the same team.
Of course, if tens of millions of Americans start leaving the country, that would be a notable event. I'll be brushing up on my French and buying T-shirts with my family's ancestral coat(s) of arms. But then we won't be worried about how to legally emigrate. In the immortal words of Nike, we'll just be doing it. And mostly not to Europe, but to Canada and Mexico. Mix a little Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and global climate change, and Toronto and Montreal might just become the biggest cities on the planet...
But I wouldn't bet on it.
Crossposted at The Seminal at FDL.
*Note, like any simplistic quantitative metric, GDP of course is not a perfect measurement, but it is useful as a first order approximation for comparing purchasing power around the globe. I use the term wealth in its fullest sense, incorporating all of the resources at our disposal. 'Money' is just one kind of resource, an important component but not all-encompassing.