And having a strong economy is generally a good thing -- there are jobs, which matters.
The US is fifth in the world in terms of incarceration rate (i.e., there are only 4 countries which imprison a larger portion of their population). The thirteenth amendment allows the US to enslave its imprisoned population (which they do, and it's a very lucrative business). The US also has a thing called the death penalty where they literally _kill_ the person convicted of a crime.
According to the world press freedom index, the US ranks 55th when it comes to freedom of the press.
I don't know if you know this, but the US has been holding immigrant kids in cages at the border. Started with Obama, increased under Trump, and then increased some more under Biden.
Guantanamo also still exists, but I suppose torturing civilians without formally charging them for a crime doesn't count against the freedom of US citizens.
By what metric does the US have a lot of freedom?
> Our universities are probably the best in the world
Good colleges aren't worth anything if only the owning class can afford to send their kids there. Going to college puts people into lifelong debt (in America, that is). Out of the top 10 universities in the world according to the QS world ranking, 4 are from the UK, 4 from the US, despite the UK having about a fifth of the population of the US.
> And having a strong economy is generally a good thing -- there are jobs, which matters.
There were jobs during slavery too (I mean the slavery from before 1865, not the 13th amendment slavery from today). Jobs are not an inherent good. About 40% of the homeless (in the US) have a job, but cannot afford housing.
I take your point, but this part isn't true. Canada is a little larger, and then there is also Mexico which is about 1/2 the size, so US is roughly 2/5ths of North America.
Canada is larger than the US but if the US extended its northern border 50 miles Canada wouldn’t have any population left.
> it's not a place [I] would recommend most people to live
Your recommendation (or lack thereof) carries little weight, then.
But to actually answer your question, there are many places in the US (urban, suburban, and rural) where fear of violent crime is not a major factor in the day-to-day life of most people. I don't know anyone who has been a victim of violent crime, and it does not feature prominently in conversations. In fact, the highly touristic areas in Europe seem to have more crime than anywhere I've personally been in the US, but I know better than to judge the entire continent by those outliers. I probably worry about as much about gang violence in south-side Chicago as you do about Romanian sex traffickers, or pickpockets in the 1st arrondissement of Paris.
But I too have felt no more threatened in numerous US urban and suburban cities than I have in many places in Europe - and the UK...
It's not without its problems but if it was _that_ bad I wouldn't have stayed...
Canadian cities are the cleanest of the three countries, but homelessness and drug use are just as prevalent in Canada as in the US. I don't remember seeing many addicts in Europe but there were certainly a lot of homeless refugees when I lived there. I guess you could argue that's not the fault of the host country, unlike the homelessness in Canada/US.
Other than that, the US cities I've lived in have felt safe and livable, with vibrant street life and plenty of great restaurants and events. I prefer urban neighborhoods which are close to the downtown core, but outside of it; the visible social problems seem to be very concentrated in certain areas, which can be avoided.
If by "guarded neighborhoods" you mean gated communities with full-time live security, I think your friends are major outliers. A very small minority of people live that way in America.
I do agree with you about "less anxiety around healthcare or education". My European friends see the world and life very differently. People don't feel guilty about living a normal life in the same way that some Americans seem to: the culture here screams "strive" and "excel", and I think that drives a lot of people to be miserable when they feel they are falling short of that expectation.
The ones that are weirdest to me is when you have people living in gated skyscrapers with homeless literally leaning against the sides of the building, so much wealth and destitution mere inches apart.
This literally can't be true every single large city in Canada is struggling with increasing homelessness right now.
Do you live in a cabin up in Muskoka??
I have stayed in Hamilton, Lake Ontario and traveled Toronto, Quebec area, etc.
The streets here are clean, spotting a homeless person is borderline impossible even if you try, in US I've seen tents, bidonvilles, homelessness everywhere, drugged zombies as soon as you entered the wrong streets in basically every city.
There's much less anxiety around healthcare or education here, violence and crime are very different too. My 180k people city hasn't seen a murder (outside very few caused by family violence, which are virtually the only cause for murders in my country) in decades.
Actually now that I think about it, I also found Canada (where my wife has family that emigrated there 80 years ago) to be better in all those regards. Have you ever crossed from Canada to US at Niagara falls? If you did and walked more than 500 meters you know what I'm talking about.
Mind you, there's no doubt US does many things great, as an engineer and wannabe entrepeneur I know US would've given me more chances, but believe it or not, not everybody wants to live the american way and money isn't everything if you have to use it to feel safer and less anxious in guarded neighbourhoods like some of my best friends in US live in.
There's countless things that US does great, and that does awfully, different people and cultures may weigh the pros/cons differently.