document updated 17 hours ago, on Jan 15, 2026

The United States is an outlier in:

Incarceration rate — The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate. It has has 22% of the world's prisoner population despite having 4% of the world population.
Foreign bases — The US has 800 foreign bases, more than all other countries combined. [2] [3]
Universal healthcare — The US is the only developed country without universal healthcare. [2]
Maternal mortality — The US has the worst maternal mortality of any wealthy country, lagging behind Saudi Arabia, Chile, and Russia. [2]
Paid parental leave — The US is the only industrialized country that doesn't guarantee paid parental leave, and is one of only 6 countries globally that offer none. [2] [3] [4]
Pharmaceutical marketing to consumers — Most countries prohibit this, except for US and New Zealand. [2]
Bail bondsmen and bounty hunters — They are illegal almost everywhere in the world, except for United States and the Philippines. [2] [3]
Grand juries — They've been abolished in all countries except two, US and Liberia.
The metric system — The US is the only industrialized country that doesn't use metric as its predominant system of measure. [2] [3]
- The US government declared metric the official system in 1975, but it made adoption optional, and in practice it had little effect.

additional keywords for this document — American exceptionalism