By William C. Shelton

  (The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

My houseguest Nina Kammerstan kept apologizing for how rich Norwegians are. She’s a journalist with NRK, Norway’s public broadcasting system. I bluntly told her, “Americans are richer.”

So we looked it up. Sure enough, in median household income, the U.S. is second, and Norway, with 0.3% less, is third. But then we found that the average American household has 20% more mouths to feed. And Nina explained to me that healthcare, higher education, and many other important essentials are free in Norway.

The next day Nina told me that America’s best journalists are comedians.

“Huh?” I asked.

She said that comedians like John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher, seem to be the only ones outside the echo chamber—the ones posing real questions and interviewing people they don’t agree with.

I thought about former CBS Evening News Anchor Walter Cronkite. Opinion polls of my youth repeatedly found him to be “the most trusted man in America.” I can’t imagine today’s Americans investing the same trust in a TV journalist.

My conversations with Nina got me thinking. During the Cronkite years, I had no doubt that the U.S.A. was the greatest nation on earth. A half-million Americans had given their lives in Europe and the Pacific to preserve democracy. My father knew that his suffering on Saipan had been for moral reasons, not to achieve dominance or economic advantage.

I took for granted that, of all nations, we had the most political and personal freedom, that individual Americans enjoyed the greatest opportunity to better themselves. In part, this was because our economic system was fair and just. It produced that highest standard of living in the world. And we enjoyed the best educational system for the most people.

None of these distinctions remains true. The Central Intelligence Agency says that 99 out of 139 nations have a more equal distribution of income than we do. The World Bank’s numbers put us at 91^st most unequal of 163. And our inequality of wealth is even more stark—146^th out of 150.

The Wall Street Journal, which promotes itself as “the daily diary of the American dream,” suggests that Americans are willing to accept this inequality because they “believe their country remains a land of unbounded opportunity.” But the Journal then reports that, “in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada) has had a better chance at prosperity.”

We rank 23^rd in the world in literacy rates. We rank 27^th in math and 22^nd in science test scores.

We do enjoy wonderful freedoms. Political scientists, journalists, and government analysts use the country-by-country scores on political rights and civil liberties annually reported by Freedom House. On a 1-to-7 scale, the U.S. ranks 1 (highest) in both categories. But so do 50 other countries, some of which are more tolerant.

When Nina tells me that she doesn’t feel free here, I don’t understand her. She explains that she means freedom from fear. Because of what might happen in the U.S. if she became seriously ill or lost her job, she would not be able to feel fully free to make critical life choices. I think that it’s odd to conflate freedom with security, until I remember Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech. Two of them were freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Despite our freedoms and standard of living, we’re nowhere near the happiest people on earth. That would be the Danes. The Satisfaction with Life Index, which inspired Somerville’s own happiness survey, ranks the U.S. at 23^rd.

Newsweek had the hubris to rank the “world’s best countries.” Their criteria were education, health, quality of life, economic competitiveness, and political environment. The U.S. ranked 11^th out of 100.

The Economist’s Intelligence Unit ranked countries on quality of life. The United States came in 13^th.

The Reputation institute annually surveys 40-50,000 global respondents regarding the world’s most respected countries. The U.S. has never made it into the top 10.

In my lifetime, we’ve gone from being the most respected nation on earth to being the most feared. In part, that’s because of one way in which we remain Number 1. Our military spending is now more than the next 19 countries’ combined. And those who fear us include our “friends.”

We’re also Number 1 in the world in how much we spend on healthcare, both per-person—$8,000—and as a percentage of the total economy—16%. But we’re 38^th in life expectancy and 34^th in infant mortality.

And we lock up more of our people than does any other nation. This Number 1 distinction has implications for personal freedom, security, economics, and fiscal policy.

Yet I’ve seen America change during my lifetime in a way that makes me unapologetically proud. Because my mother’s family lived in Lousiana and Mississippi, I saw Jim Crow in practice. The subsequent transformation in how we understand and live with each other is, to me, almost miraculous. We still have much to learn. But no other nation has worked as hard at it as hard or changed as much as we have.

I no longer believe that the United States is the greatest nation on earth, mostly because I believe that the concept is meaningless. Nations, like individuals, are complex creations with diverse mixes of strengths and weaknesses. No one can be “the greatest” along every dimension. Part of maturity is learning how best to use our strengths while improving on our weaknesses.

One way to do so is participating in community, where we complement each other’s strengths to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In doing so, we begin to realize that freedom doesn’t come so much from non-interference as it comes from working together to create more opportunity for all of us to grow and get better.

When we grow up as a nation, we’ll learn the same lesson.