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I don’t have numbers on this but I also don’t think it’s necessary to make the point.
North Korea has a better border policy towards illegal entrants than we do. Finland has a better educational system. Germany has better employment law. Singapore has better real estate policies. China’s executed people for expropriating capital out of the country. Switzerland has a better healthcare system. How many examples would you regard as sufficient?
I'm not saying the solution is for America to immediately and identically adopt all said policies and replace the existing ones we have. There are unique circumstances that fit each country’s needs the way that they do. I don’t think raw economic or GDP numbers are the appropriate gauge to make this argument however. It’s been well known for quite a while that correlations between a person’s annual salary and personal happiness fall off remarkably about around $70,000. You don’t need to be an American to make $70k per year. And being the richest country in the world by GDP matters far less than where those numbers are captured and what the distribution is.
A list of cherrypicked examples beats the typical experience. For the US and almost all other countries for each carefully picked example. On one hand yes, that's how cherrypicked examples work, but it is not impactful or relevant. I'm not learning much about the inadequacies of America in our underperforming relative to North Korean insularity.
If no amount of examples will be good enough for you, there’s not much I can do beyond that if you think people don’t live said experiences.
I am pointing out the level of cherrypicking it takes to select a very narrow policy each from a separate country and compare each in isolation to the US. Especially when those countries would underperform each other by almost all these metrics; the North Korean border policy not making it better than the US or Germany at employment law.
And that's not even getting into if these policies are even desirable. North Korea out competing us at extreme insularity. China executing people for all sorts of reasons I don't agree with; including the popular act of getting currency out of China. They sure are "better at" executing people for things that are not crimes in the US or other developed countries. Something North Korea is also much better at than us. Singapore enacting racial housing quotas. They certainly are more extreme by those measures. Not that I'd say they are "better at" setting policy for some of these examples.
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