From Bret Devereaux’s blog (https://acoup.blog/2022/07/08/collections-is-the-united-states-exceptional/, approx 5,600 words):

I am not asking if the United States is the ‘best’ country; I rather like my country, but I understand it is not to everyone’s taste and that is fine… Instead I want to explore a number of ways in which the United States might clearly be considered ‘great’ or even ‘the greatest’ (either now or ever) to make the case both that the United States is obviously and indisputably exceptional and that several of these exceptional facets provide quite a lot of evidence to support the contention that the United States is, in those ways, a great country.

…the United States is both the biggest rich country (that is, it is the largest high income country) and the richest big country (that is, it has the highest income per capita of any country with a large population or land area) both now and at any other time in history…. Consequently, the United States dominates the global economy in a way that no other country does and no other country has ever done.

…the United States is the most technologically advanced country to have ever existed. This is a tricky metric to average because it comes so many different fields and of course many countries excel in one field or another, but no country excels in anywhere near as many fields or on as many metrics as the United States does when it comes to technology or the production of knowledge.

We can start with universities. The United States makes up 4.25% of the world’s population but around half of its top research universities.

…the United States is also arguably the world’s oldest functioning democracy and likewise arguably has the world’s oldest still-used constitution… By at least some measurements, the United States is above and away the most individualist country in the world… American culture and cultural products are pervasive in a way that no other culture has ever really been. Of the top grossing films worldwide, American production companies are responsible for all of the top 29 before Skyfall (2012) finally gives us a non-American entry.

…massive U.S. military spending continues to buy an incomparably massive amount of military power. The United States operates half of the world’s active aircraft carriers, 11 of the top 11 for raw combat power (which mostly comes down to the size of their air wing). The United States has both the world’s largest air force (the United States Air Force) and the world’s second largest air force (the U.S. Navy)... Normally due to balancing behavior, we’d expect a large coalition of allies to oppose U.S. interests, but instead the opposite is true: the United States leads the largest collection of peacetime allies in human history. The United States has essentially constructed a web of interlocking alliances with the USA at the center; NATO alone makes up a simple majority of global military spending before one even considers other treaty allies of the United States like Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and at least notionally most of South America.

…It has resulted in a country which is not merely exceptional, but exceptionally exceptional – that is, the United States is highly unusual in an unusually high number of ways.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the post has many comments…

And more good news from FutureCrunch (now Fix the News) (bolding is mine):

Deadliest form of heart attack falls by over half in United States
A recent study found that the rate of STEMI ((ST‐segment-elevation myocardial infarction)) heart attacks, caused by a near-total blockage of a coronary artery, has decreased by nearly 50% over the past 15 years. However, there are still disparities in care based on income, with low-income individuals experiencing higher rates of STEMI heart attacks and being more likely to die from them.