America isn't exceptional – it's the exception (not-ship.com)

If you look at military spending US is exceptional

To pick one point out of the article for discussion, does anyone have any idea why the US is the leader in per-capita prison rates? The laws aren't all that different from other first world nations, and i doubt all the other nations have magically solved crime. What is going on? Is crime just lower in other nations? Do they not punish as many crimes with jail time?

We invented so much technology, but drove it out of the country at the behest of labor cost reduction.

We have so many smart people, but they are irrelevant in the AI that we are giving away.

Is there any hope? I am not seeing it.

I'm curious if things change when comparing the US to the EU. The US is too diverse to compare to one homogeneous country. The EU might be better in this regard.

While I agree that believing the US is "uniquely great, superior to other nations, destined for a special role in the world" is silly, this article feels just as cherry-picked, on the other extreme. The US is an outlier in plenty of negative ways, yes. But it's also an outlier in GDP per capita, venture capital investment, Nobel Prizes, university quality, immigrant demand, medical innovation, and cultural export. Any honest look at the data shows a country that is simultaneously world-leading and world-lagging depending on which metrics you choose. Picking only one side of that ledger isn't analysis.

Exceptional in these examples seems to be a euphimism for uniquely bad.