I don't live in US, but I think it's not very fair to measure US with separate countries. It would make more sense to measure separate states. Because if you take EU as a whole you would get worse result too.
The US is a country. France is a country, so is Germany. How is that "not fair"? Should France's results be broken out by province or Australia by state?
Yet another reason to break down the US into States, where local policies dominate.
I glanced at the 466 page report for this and couldn't grep a US state... Someone should sell the OECD on an OLAP system so they can easily find this stuff out and publish it. (Or even let journalists and/or the public have direct access...)
Sure, and if we had the data broken down we could determine how much variance is within each country and how valid a country-wide report is for each country. Somehow I think France's partitions would be a lot more uniform than the US's partitions for this study, but without the data I can't be sure.
I can absolutely guarantee that this is not the case in France. Try comparing Île-de-France and similarly sized Limousin for example.
I spend a lot of time both in the EU and the US, and find the US remarkably culturally homogeneous compared to Europe. In a country the size of a continent, from coast to coast, you find the same dominant language, traditions, politics, religion, holidays, sports, restaurant chains and stores.
What is the case I imagine, is that one is trained from birth to differentiate the tiny differences within one's own culture and values those so highly, that they look like remarkable diversity, while one doesn't recognize the differences between strangers, and automatically doesn't value them very highly. Can you tell a significant difference between a Slovene and a Hungarian, for example?
This is how 'latin americans' seem like one uniform group, or even 'sub saharan africans' or 'asians', while objectively Amhara from Ethiopia, Hausa from Nigeria and San from South Africa differ far more from each other than say Americans, Italians and Danes differ from each other.
Every country has more and less developed regions, even super rich mini and micro states like Monaco, Lichtenstein and Luxembourg. And inside these regions, every town has more and less developed areas, and inside these towns, every street does, and on these streets, there are more and less developed homes. Inside these homes, there are more and less developed rooms.
You can keep zooming in, to the most highly developed desk in the most highly developed building in the most highly developed street, in the most highly developed town, etc, and then be content with the absolutely stellar performance if it wasn't for the periphery dragging us down.
