The dichotomy between how America seems to set the standards in medicine, finance, etc. but SO behind in things like parental leave, baby friendly requirements, etc.
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America is an extremely capitalist country. This gives lots of opportunity to companies looking to make more money, advance medicine, … . However, the government has a lot of limitations in its ability to do things that cost money, like government funded healthcare or parental leave or … .
Despite its considerable wealth and industrial and scientific output, the United States is actually quite a bit behind other Western nations in terms of Education, Healthcare, and lacking a lot of Social programs that other nations consider a necessity.
The US is one of the lowest rated Western Nations in terms of overall education, is the only western country that doesn’t have centralized government healthcare, and is very behind in terms of social programs.
Meanwhile the US has one of the highest childhood death rates, an obesity epidemic, a massive divide between rich and poor, and the worlds largest prison population.
But why?
Most Western social programs were implement in the post WW2 era when European nations were rebuilding and focus was on supporting the local population with new things like social programs, housing, and healthcare.
The US didn’t have a rebuilding phase because it was effectively untouched by the War, but had already seen a number of new-deal reforms including medicaid implemented by FDRs government prior to WW2. There was an intended continuation of these programs that would have lead into a US centralized healthcare system but this was stopped.
So what changed?
In the 50s the US went through the Red Scare when people like Senator Joseph McCarthy led a period of anti-communist sentiment at the start of the Cold War.
This lead to a cultural shift where the US started to emphasize the things about itself that it considered made them “better than the Commies” including Capitalism and free market ideals.
Due to this anything even remotely socialist in the US became associated with Communism, so attempts to continue the next phase of the New Deal social programs were halted and never started again because they became politically unpopular and out of a misguided fear that it was a one-way ticket to Communism.
Socialism became a scare word, and Conservative elements have convinced a lot of average Joe Americans to believe that social programs are bad, people are freeloading off the Government instead of working hard, and all of your problems could be solved if you paid less taxes.
So while other Western Nations developed an extensive set social of programs the US regressed.
Other comments are missing the point. This isn’t really an economic issue, it’s a government one. The federalist nature of the US government means that the feds can create laws for things that need to be consistent across all states. Things like quality of food, medicine, and some road laws. This is why we have some government institutions like the FDA for example.
But labor laws become tricky due to the extreme geographic diversity of the country. You have cities like NYC that have a population greater than ~half of the countries in the EU. You also have states like Wyoming, which has a population smaller than the number of people subscribed to this subreddit. The feds would have to pass laws that would work for every state, including Alaska and Hawaii.
Obviously this would be extremely difficult and a waste of time, so the feds don’t do this. Instead they turn the power over to the states to do this as well. They let Wyoming pass laws that work for Wyoming, and New York pass laws for New York.
The USA will probably never pass similar laws at a federal level, because it doesn’t need to. Personally, I get 1 month of paid paternity leave, not because it’s mandated by the government, but because my company wants their benefits to be competitive.
The ones who write the book about economy, business and science and enforce/decide the rules in these areas do not benefit from workers rights, parental leave, and sick days. They also don’t benefit from an entire population who’s financially secure. They benefit from having desperate employees who are a few missed paychecks away from losing everything, desperate enough to ingore the few rights they have in a mad bid to all get promoted higher t improve their lives.
What are “baby friendly requirements”?
“Behind” is a silly way to think of this because those are government policies. Whether and how to provide those things is a matter of opinion.
The US is able to lead in the fields you cite, and others, because of it’s extraordinary wealth. As an example of how rich the US is, the poorest state, Mississippi, has a higher GDP than the UK. This wealth serves as the fuel for investment and scientific research which enable the US to be a leader. Some people would say that the reduced government regulation in the US is what allows this massive economic growth in the first place.
America is a capitalistic country where companies are all about maximizing profits. Companies do something called lobbying to help influence laws in their favor, because they have the money to do that but we as normal people do not. Creating laws that give people these rights, like paternal leave, would mean that these businesses won’t make as much money, because these types of benefits take their worker bees away from work and would disrupt the flow of their money.
America was founded with a philosophy of individualism instead of collectivism. The result is that people fortunate enough to have money and power can use that to generate more money and power do themselves, while poor people are left to fend for themselves.
The focus on individualism means people think their taxes shouldn’t be spent on, for example, someone else’s healthcare, even though universal healthcare benefits everyone.
In short; the us was founded on the idea of liberty; forcing employers to pay would be slavery, and taking it through taxes would be additional indefensible theft. This may be harder to see now that we’ve devolved into democratic mob-rule but that is why.
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