Make Americans Great Again ~ Part 1

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You may have heard of a catchphrase that goes “Make America Great Again.” But what about Americans? Can we make Americans great again? Or are Americans already great? The greatest? Not so great? Used to be better but somehow got worse? Used to be mediocre and now reign as the GOAT? What’s going on with Americans?

It does seem that if a nation wants to be great – it’ll need to have great citizens. So let’s take a look at what Americans are great at, the greatest at, and not so great at. This post will be the first in a series on everyone’s favorite citizenry. Actually, come to think of it, Americans don’t seem to be all that fond of other Americans, so we’ll just hope it’s at least someone’s favorite citizenry.

Let’s start out with a little background on Americans. When I was a kid, I was taught, probably around the 4th grade, that American culture comes from Greek culture. I wasn’t told this directly. I just had to spend an excruciating amount of time reading about Greek things that weren’t interesting to me. Also they were incomprehensible.

But I get it now. I get what I didn’t get in the 4th grade. American identity traces its roots back to the ancient Greeks. Not the ancient Egyptians, who were rockstars of the ancient world. Nope, ancient Greeks.

Their language, their ideas, their myths, their ideas about government. Greek science, Greek medicine. These all form the basis for American ideas about all these things.

Greek sculpture, Greek theatre, Greek poems. All enormously influential. Greek philosophy. Greek hubris too.

Sculpture. What an odd thing to trace back to an itty bitty part of the ancient world that didn’t last that long. But if you’re an American, you’ve accidentally grown up on ancient Greek sculpture. You just assume that Greek sculpture is regular sculpture – and that other types of sculpture aren’t.

Of course, American identity didn’t stop forming itself with the ancient Greeks. Christianity got in there too. Christianity got in there so thoroughly that people are always surprised when I say I’m not Christian. They just naturally expect me to be Christian because I’m American.

Of course, the Greeks and Christianity are both in essence European. So Americans come from the traditions of Christian Europeans.

Christian Europeans believe in responsibilities. Christian Europeans believe in control. Christian Europeans believe in a single person who makes decisions. They believe in friends – and enemies. Which is not to say Christian Europeans are friendly.

European history has been forged by an interminable list of wars. Armed conflict and Europe seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. Maybe not the best use of either ingredient, but everyone’s used to it, and it seems kind of easy to haul it out again.

So here is America full of people who accidentally inherited a set of ideas from Europe and from Christianity. Responsible, controlling, bossy. Believing in friends. And believing in enemies. Not that different from Europe, but a little different. Inheritors of a tradition of hubris.

And always ready to get itself into some kind of an armed conflict.

Sigh. This armed conflict part is an important part of the American identity. Unlike Australia, America wasn’t born as a penal colony. But America was born in war, at least in its own telling of the story.

That war was an uprising. A revolution. A crime of sorts. Against prevailing authority.

It wasn’t the armed conflict that created the United States though. It was a constitution. And that constitution was not born of revolutionary armed fervor. Nope, it was birthed by balancing the competing interests of different groups. Which is an entirely different thing from walking around with a weapon.

Americans was created by the people who have lived in it, lived in small cities throughout this vast nation. There’s some sort of mythology that America is rural or should be or could be or would be if it was to be great again. Not so.

American is urban. And suburban. Americans cluster, as people do, in the densely populated areas where other Americans live. America has been more urbanized than most other areas of the world since at least 1950. Something like 86% of Americans live in cities or suburbs or similarly densely populated areas.

So just how great are the city-dwelling folk of America stacked up against the folk of other nations? What kind of fun can we have with a boatload of statistics and cross-country comparisons?

Let’s start with a very basic measure of greatness – size. How do Americans stack up size-wise?

LET’S TALK SIZE

HEIGHT OF AMERICANS

According to WorldData.info, Americans don’t even come closer to winning in this important race to tower intimidatingly over the people of other nations. The Dutch come in first. The average height in the Netherlands for men is a towering 6 foot 2 inches. The average height for Dutch women is almost 5 foot 7 inches.

Americans come in 43rd in the height sweepstakes. The average height of American men is at about 5 foot 9. The average height for American women is about 5 feet 4 inches. In this area at least, Americans have got to look up to the Dutch.

Of course, there are plenty of people Americans can look down on. Such as the Spanish, who are a little shorter on average for both sexes than Americans. In truth, most of the nations of the world are a little shorter on average than Americans.

VERDICT: Americans are great at being tall – but not that great.

WEIGHT OF AMERICANS

Well, if Americans aren’t quite tall enough to intimidate the entire world – how about frightening the world with our enormous weight?

Sorry, no can do. Unless – you’re an American Samoan. The average weight of a man in American Samoa is almost 230 pounds. American men who don’t live in American Samoa can only scrounge together a measly 202 pounds. Granted, that’s almost enough to squash an Afghani male of average weight in that country – who only musters up 156 pounds.

But what about the women? Well sadly, the women of American Samoa have all other American women beat in this category. The average weight of a woman in American Samoa is almost 219 pounds. The rest of the women of America on average weigh about 174 pounds. Again, both Americans and American Samoans loom large over the women of Afghanistan who on average weigh about 139 pounds.

VERDICT: Americans are great at weighing a lot – but not that great.

BODY MASS INDEX OF AMERICANS

There’s height and there’s weight, but what about the ratio between them? The standard index for measuring the ratio is known as the BMI or body mass index. Where do Americans rank on this supposed measure of overweightness and obesity?

Solidly behind the American Samoans once again. At an average BMI of 33.4 for men, American Samoa is one of a few countries classified as having an average weight that falls into the category of obese. The average American male BMI of 29.3 flirts with obesity but doesn’t tie the knot. Admittedly, American men do out-BMI a country like Slovakia which comes in at a very mediocre average male BMI of 28.

Like most of the rest of the countries in the world, Slovakia’s male population is considered to be, on average, overweight. French men, of course, are not overweight on average.

Around the world, women are not as overweight as men, but both American Samoa and America buck this trend. The women of American Samoa have an average BMI of 35.6, an impressive statistic. And American women have an average of BMI of 29.7, out overweighting their male counterparts. French women, of course, are not on average overweight.

French women are not as slim, by BMI standards, as the women of a number of countries in Africa though. The women of Burundi, Ethiopia, and Eritrea all come in with average BMIs of less than 22.

VERDICT: In terms of having a high BMI, Americans are pretty darn great! However, in spite of publicity implying that Americans are the fattest people in the world – they’re not. So don’t think you can claim that title for yourselves!

WHAT ABOUT THE NUMBER OF AMERICANS?

We can’t just talk about how big Americans are or aren’t. We’ve got to talk about how many of them there are. If you want to be great on a world stage, you’ve got to have enough people to make that happen. How does America stack up in terms of number of citizens available to pursue world domination?

Greatest population size:

The World Bank Group keeps track of stuff like this because population size impacts a country’s economy. Do you think America has more people than any other country?

Of course you don’t. Unless you are really really really misinformed, you think China has more people America. The Chinese historically have been greater than Americans at producing people. The Chinese, however, are losing their edge in terms of producing people these days. This has led Chinese leaders to suddenly want the Chinese to produce more people. Instead of what they used to want – which was for the Chinese to produce fewer people.

The Chinese have fallen down on the job of producing Chinese people so drastically of late that another country, India, has overtaken China in population. There are discrepancies in figures, of course, because all population counts are estimates. But most of those who peer at population size for a living agree that India has now overtaken China in terms of population size. And its population growth is on an upward trajectory, whereas China’s is on a downward one. China is finding out what a lot of countries are finding out these days – what happens when you have a gigantic number of old people.

The world at large is currently enjoying, or suffering from, a truly extreme number of extremely old people. An extreme number of extremely old people that is unprecedented in the history of humanity. If one of your goals in life is to be old, this is good news! You’ve got a relatively good chance of achieving your goal.

But we were talking about Americans. There are a lot of them. Over 330 million. Maybe 335 million, in spite of the pandemic taking an impressive bite out of the number of citizens.

330 million Americans, impressive as that is (and it is impressive), is almost kind of nothing compared to almost a billion and a half Indians. There are at least four times as many Indians on the planet as there are Americans. If you put China’s population and India’s population together, at around 3 billion, you’d see how tiny America’s population is compared to the Asian juggernaut of LOTS OF PEOPLE.

TOP 7 COUNTRIES BASED ON POPULATION SIZE:

Here’s the list of the top 7 countries in the world, based on population size: India, China, America, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil.

Okay, so we’re going to give America a shout out for representing North America. Yay North America. And we’re going to give Brazil a shout out for representing South America. Can’t keep the Americas out of the top spots!

And we’re going to tip our hat to Nigeria for representing Africa. Africa not gonna be left out!

Europe’s gonna be left out though. Cuz the other top spots go to Indonesia and Pakistan. Those two population behemoths add another half billion or so to the Asian population.

The bottom line is that we’re all living on a planet awash in Asians. The rest of the continents can only gaze in envy at the prolific populations of the Asian nations.

VERDICT: Americans are pretty darn great – but nowhere near as great as the Indians and the Chinese.

Okay, so whatever you think of America these days, you can’t deny that Americans are pretty great at some things, but not the greatest in the world in the key statistics measured so far. What about extent? I mean, just how far do Americans in America stretch in terms of land mass?

GREATEST LAND MASS

Remember, the nation started with thirteen kinda tiny colonies, one of them (Rhode Island), the size of a postage stamp (maybe a little bigger than that). It was things like the Louisiana Purchase and Manifest Destiny that saw America’s territorial ambitions take great leaps forward. Then there was the random theft (by war) of part of Mexico, for reasons nobody has ever really explained to me. (I suppose it’s possible Mexico didn’t want places like Texas anymore. After all, it was full of Texans and Mexico is pretty darn big already). There were also incursions into Canadian territory and random adjuncts like Alaska and Hawaii. Alaska added a lot of land mass.

Did all these acquisitions put Americans over the top into the exalted number one spot for size of their nation?

Oh of course not. Russia is huge. Gigantic. Ginormous. Ridiculous. It would be scary except a lot of Russia is made up land that no one in their right mind would want to live in. Not to say no one lives there (people live in Minnesota too), but there are places in Russia that can be summed up by the word “cold.”

Canada comes in second in the land mass sweepstakes and much of it too can be described as “cold.” Other nations will seemingly let you have a lot of land if that land is covered in snow and ice for most of the year.

Americans do take the prize, though, for claiming the most land by area that is not entirely cold. Yay Americans!!!!

Other countries that deserve major kudos for putting their mitts on lots of land by area are China, India, Brazil, and Australia. Also, honorable mention to Australia for basically claiming an entire continent. Accidentally, since a fair amount of the population of Australia was just dumped there by the British. But still…

VERDICT: Americans are really great at spreading out across vast tracts of land. But still not the greatest.

Okay, so far we’re building a portrait of Americans as a people who are competitive but not dominant. Showing up, looking good, but not quite enough oomph to put them over the finish line first.

So let’s try looking at factors that Americans typically seem to value very very highly. I’m talking about economic factors like:

WORLD’S LARGEST ECONOMY

Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner!

The United States economy is the largest in the world as measured by nominal GDP. 

Investopedia

Americans win! Americans produce the largest nominal gross domestic product in the world.

In fact, the United States economy is ginormous. Americans are so productive, those tall-ass Dutch can’t begin to compete. Take that, tall people from Holland!

Even the Chinese, who are pretty darn great themselves, have not been able to outproduce the Americans – yet. That’s even with the advantage of there being so many of them. Maybe if you weren’t so old, Chinese people!

OTHER COUNTRIES NOT SO GREAT!

Investopedia has the Indian economy clocking in at number 5. Nice try, India! Those billion and a half (almost) Indians aren’t outproducing our not that tall or fat Americans.

How about Russia’s economy in terms of productivity? Fuhggedaboutit. Russia don’t rank.

As for Canada, well nice guys finish in the top 10, but top 10 ain’t number one baby!

In fact, by the standards of the rest of the world, America’s economy is so great that it’s a head-scratching wonder that anyone would come up with a phrase that includes the word ‘again’, when it is pretty clear that American economic dominance has never gone away.

If there is a perception that America (and by extension, Americans) aren’t that great anymore, could it be that some unlikely citizens of this vast (but not the vastest) country value something other than the economy? It seems impossible.

Have these whiny citizens no patriotism, no pride, no clue? What difference does it make if the cost of living goes up as long as Americans are still greater than everyone else in the realm of the economy? Whingers! (And in truth, America’s inflation problems have been tame compared to those of many other nations.)

Could it be that Americans want that great economy to benefit them and not just the wealthy few? Hmmmm. Well, the ones who wear hats referring to the word ‘again’ certainly don’t vote like it. But maybe that’s what they mean? Even if their proposed means for achieving that have something of the quality of opposite-land.

Food for thought.

At least until our next episode of “Make Americans Great Again!”