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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