>Why, at the government level, do we not look at best practices worldwide?

Because there is a ruling class and for the rulers it is not about best practices or happiness, it is about maximizing wealth and maintaining power.

Education and healthcare (which should be considered human rights not industries) are very helpful in seeing some of the tools the ruling class uses to maintain power. Both education and healthcare are standardized enough they are rated by Country and while the US spends more on both than any other country the US is not even close to being rated number 1 in either category.

Yet, to your point, when one points to other countries as evidence how well other systems work (with less funding) that person will be demonized as Anti-American. Even in the current pandemic where the numbers speak for themselves, we are subjected to having to hear the ruling class get on TV and tell us how we are #1 and doing better than every other Country and even worse in many cases this ruling class refers to the pandemic in the past tense and proclaim how they defeated it. It is Machiavellianism incarnate.

> Why, at the government level, do we not look at best practices worldwide?

I've seriously been wondering why there isn't a field of study dedicated to comparing government policies across countries. I'm sure such a field of study exists, but I have no idea what the name of that field is - does that fall under public policy? Comparative politics? The fact that I can't put a name on it is the very problem as it shows the field (if it even exists) has very little influence on public policy (unlike say economics, which has the Council of Economic Advisors, CBO, BLS, Fed, U.S. treasury, etc).

It's hard to identify which practices are responsible for which outcomes. Suppose you wanted to combine the high happiness rate of Denmark with the low crime rate of Japan; how would you figure out which are the policies you need to accomplish that?

There is research, and it's pretty intuitive. Create stability. Reduce income inequality. Focus spending on social programs. Help people out of addiction, crime, give them a network, healthcare, education and jobs. People who cannot work need funding. Enough to live a dignified life. People are happy when they don't have to worry. People who are happy with the system doesn't really commit crime.

Why has no-one thought of this before?

> Americans tend to reject it entirely out of hand as it smells like vile socialism to them.

This is a bit too reductionist. I'd wager that most Americans agree that these are worthwhile goals, but many are skeptical that empowering the government is the best way to achieve these ends.

On concrete policies along these lines many poll in the majority. They don’t get implemented not because the American people are against them (they’re often for them) but because powerful interests are against them. (Corporations and some portion of the very wealthy.)

Just as a recent example of the influence of money here, there was a vote to reduce defense budget (which is at record highs) by 10% and reallocate that money. It was voted down. But those that voted against the reduction got 3.4x as much money from the defense industry as those that voted for the cut.

The same dynamic plays out on issues like single payer health care, with those against it getting major contributions from health insurance lobbyists who want to defend the status quo even while the policy has a large majority approval across both democrats and republicans (and a whopping 88% approval among Democrats).

[1] https://readsludge.com/2020/07/22/dems-voting-against-pentag...

>but many are skeptical that empowering the government is the best way to achieve these ends.

That just seems like a rejection of socialism with extra words.

Not really. There's a lot of debate on the role of government within socialist circles themselves, and there are many socialists that are skeptical of the idea that you can implement socialism top-down, without it becoming either totalitarian, or a form of collectivist capitalism where the ruling elites collectively own the means of production and collect economic rents from the rest.

We can surely agree that cheap wide good education has to be one of the policies necessary for that, yet it's quite ignored even in some rich countries.

A big problem is that many educators and school boards treat education as indoctrination. i.e. "Teach people what to think"

The real goal of education is to teach people how to think. Logic, rhetoric, analysis, scientific method, how to identify logical fallacies, understanding statistics, falsifiable theories, analyzing history not only through secondary sources, but actively seeking out primary sources to corroborate secondary sources, so on and so forth.

A useful education for a healthy well-functioning society is about inquiry, not regurgitation.

There's near-universal agreement that education should be cheap and wide and good. The question is which policies best accomplish those goals. Should we add vocational high schools like Denmark has, where teachers can focus on practical skills since it's already been decided the students won't go to college? Should we add 60 more days to the school year and universal high school admission tests like they do in Japan?

These are the kinds of questions that need to be studied and answered. But instead, politicians just say “‘Murica is #1” and leave it at that. The platitudes need to stop. We need some policy wonk technocrats to take over government.

I don't think this is something we can blame on the politicians, though. People got grumpy enough about Common Core; imagine how much worse it would go over if a school district announced that it was going to transition towards rote learning.

I can't agree with that, no. "Cheap wide good education" is not a policy. What policies need to be set to achieve it?

I agree. There are many practices common to countries reporting high levels of happiness that Americans (And certainly other western nations) ignore seemingly on principle.

How should the United States address this issue given that it is usually in the top 5 with spending on public education per student every year?

We would have to analyze the actual distribution of that spend. When this is done, we see wealthier places have higher spending per capita because public schools in the US are funded primarily by property taxes.

Yeah, and local property taxes, at that.

I mean, if I were designing a system to reinforce inequality in districts and schools, local property taxes would be first on my list of policies.

One of the thing Americans do differently is setting up systems for inequality from the get go. First past the post voting, but also using education to produce/select 'winners', rather than use it as a tool for equality. One could say this is a choice and there's no wrong way to make it, but to me it seems clear that it is the root cause for many of the issues in the US. I think superstar systems and mentality necessarily produces inequality and inequality necessarily produces problems.

The US has lots of people with a superficial understanding of Scandinavia telling everyone that their idea of Scandinavia is brilliant, easy, etc. (and btw, this is a function of generally poor policy education in the US, the US produces probably the best policy studies research...very little of this is taught in courses that people who go on to be politicians study).

If you go to Scandinavia or study comparative politics, the answer is simple: Scandinavia is Scandinavia, the US is the US. They are different places with outcomes that reflect different values and choices.

What people ignore about Scandinavia: mono-cultural society (if you tried some of the integration stuff that these countries do in the US, you would have people loading guns), huge tax burden on middle class (in the US people who currently pay no tax will have to hand over 40%+ of their income), small population, heavily monopolistic economy, significant exposure to trade/reliance on individual companies, significant natural resources (Norway has 20% of the US oil reserves, their population is smaller than almost every state in the US). Saying they are happier is very woolly, particularly as most countries in that region are societies that place significant social pressure on individuals to conform and be happy (their rates of depression and suicide are high, indeed when Sweden was the socialist paradise their rate of suicide was highest in the world).

Also, you ignore that most Scandinavian countries have moved towards the US model after decades of underperformance and then financial crisis. Even Denmark which has huge trade union membership has the most flexible labour anywhere...again, what people understand about Scandinavia is usually based on their preconceptions about America and their belief in a perfect, easy ideal that confirms their views about the world.

The US gets things far more right than wrong. It is, by far, the most successful economy that has existed to this point. No other large country has replicated that success (all the East Asian economies used Germany as their model, which has resulted in significant baggage). You can say that some stuff needs to be changed...okay, but it isn't as simple as just copying Scandinavia. That will never happen, and won't work if it did. It just makes no sense. The solution to an American problem is American, not Swedish.

Talking about US being the most successful economy in the world is kinda misleading without talking about the role that political geography, and how it applied to WW1 and WW2, played in that.