USA – Not What I Expected
I’ve now been to several places in the U.S. New York, St. Louis, Dallas and San Antonio and I can say I had a real cultural shock . After living in Sweden and Canada (Montreal), the U.S. feels like the far edge of the spectrum in terms of urban planning, culture, safety nets, food, roads and public transport. Basically everything looks and feels exactly as chaotic as it seems and I expected more from the world’s biggest economy. Let’s be fair: the U.S. is enormous. But still, numbers are numbers. USA GDP per capita: $89,105 Sweden GDP per capita: $74,900 Some might argue the U.S. is too big to keep everything as neat, clean, and well-organized as Sweden. But let’s look at my own invented metric GDP per square kilometer : USA: $3,102,347 / km² Sweden: $1,775,902 / km² So by this measure, the U.S. has almost double the dollars per square kilometer . Yet paradoxically the roads are full of potholes old buildings are collapsing next to fancy hotels and “newly built”...