Friday, May 31, 2013

Unfair Comparison

This is the one I am writing about the comparisons that all the surveys do with what is the best country, health care, happiness index, living conditions, student competitiveness and all the others that come in every now and then. Now without going into much detail, I have a problem with all these surveys. As I have said before, these comparisons are unfair to me because America is country comprising of fifty states and it is several times bigger than the countries surveyed. Furthermore the U.S. is a multicultural society with low taxes and a tradition of resisting government programs and interference. And the fact is that even if the U.S. is a superpower, it does not mean it can be number one in everything. Although it tries to be on top but the sheer population of the U.S. and the vastness of it makes it very difficult to have a lifestyle as comparable to the top level countries of the world surveyed. Our students struggle to stay in school not because we cannot help them but because there are so many and have so many myriad problems with variable background that I believe the same would happen if they were in Sweden, Norway, Singapore or New Zealand. Then the sheer number of immigrants with diversified background that the U.S. takes every year makes it even harder to integrate in the U.S. society with different needs and cultural and traditional ideals. I don’t know if the surveyors take this into account but the surveys are meaningless without having these sort of comparisons.

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