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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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.
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