Really, every other country? Even Somalia, North Korea, or Venezuela? I find that often when people criticize the US by saying "no other country has this probl

Really, every other country? Even Somalia, North Korea, or Venezuela? I find that often when people criticize the US by saying "no other country has this problem!" they are mainly thinking of parliamentary democracies in Western Europe. It's true that the US system doesn't function as well as most European countries. It functions better than most countries in the world. Countries are on a spectrum of institutional competence from roughly Venezuela to Iceland. The US is somewhere in the interior of this spectrum, and not on one of its endpoints. I'm not sure why people find this so incredibly surprising. Do people just think that because the US is wealthy and powerful, it somehow "ought to" rival Western Europe on every other index of development? That simply isn't the case -- the US is deeply dysfunctional in many ways and should be thought of in comparison with other deeply dysfunctional countries. Somebody can't "just" decide to fix its problems overnight.