The Book

This website complements and updates the findings from the soon-to-be published book We’re Number One!? America’s Uncertain Standing in the World (Routledge, April 2025). The final pages of the book were written just as the second Trump administration took office. This website will update policy ] changes and will post new international rankings when they become available.

Consider this website as our source for tracking improvements or disruptions in American domestic policy. For example, will the Executive Orders and actions of the Trump administration make the United States a global leader in climate mitigation or will they prove to be a disruption and retreat from worldwide leadership? Will housing policy improve? Education? Social safety net? And so forth.

The basic message of this website and the book is this: unless we are content with mediocrity and national embarrassment in so much of our domestic policies and outcomes, it should be quite evident that America has work to do. In far too many categories of domestic policy, the United States is not Number One, or even Number Ten, when compared to other industrial democratic countries. No, we are mired in the twenties, thirties, or even worse. Sometimes we are outliers, with policies or practices that none of the other democratic countries have.