Good list and I agree on many points.

(4) is total bs though. If you look into the better life index, it's a total joke. Here's one quick tidbit, it rates the bottom 10% in Poland as having a better standard of living than the bottom 10% of France or Japan.

You think that's a joke? It gets better! It rates the TOP 10% of Poland as better than the top 10% of France or Japan, too!

If you know anything about these countries you'd laugh (with all due respect to Poland, great country for the resources they're working with right now and the history they've endured).

(5) is partially false. You can find an equivalent population in Western Europe (e.g. UK, France, Germany, Benelux, Scandinavia) the size of the US population, whose welfare state policies make the US look poor. Of course on a world scale it's great, when you figure there's more than a billion in all of Africa, China and Asia, where the story is quite different. But compared to the best in the world, the US doesn't rank at the top, and we don't have to look at countries of 5 million to make that comparison.

(6-7) Least important. Long-term, yes, but you're mostly referencing a snapshot in time that's not very meaningful without context. After all, if you see your economy drop by 50%, high growth rates after aren't anything special, you're simply returning to where you were years ago. And if you come from a low position like China, getting growth rates that outpace e.g. the US by gigantic amounts isn't very special either, as you're merely catching up slowly to where others have been for decades. The growth number in and of itself is a small indicator without context. Don't forget, Greece and Spain and Ireland's 2015 and 2016 growth forecasts are double that of Germany (guess where you want to live. Germany). And China's is more than 2x that of the US (guess where I'd want to live, the US). Besides the claim that Europe hasn't grown in 8 years is false. Look at Real GDP per Capita, that removes inflation and population changes. You'll find Europe grew a tiny bit. The US isn't really any different, barely any higher than in 2007 [0].

(9) Partially true, partially not true. So for one, rankings wildly differ. The QS rankings have 18 out of top 50 universities in the US. Just 2 in the top 5, compared to the UK (a country with a population 5x smaller) which has 3 in the top 5. Other rankings are more favorable to the US, it depends. But what I think is important is that a lot of these rankings have little to do with education, and a lot to do with your point (8), which is research by 1% of the student base. Almost all of these rankings put a gigantic weight on peer review and citations. So if Chomsky is at MIT, well that boosts up the rate by a gazillion because he's one of the most cited people in the world. Even if he doesn't teach, or even if he teaches in a field that only 10 students in that university actually study.

You'd be surprised that quality of education isn't at all really measured, only by crappy proxies. So for example for QS (it's a horrible ranking, but very popular), 40% is peer review (i.e. almost completely irrelevant to the majority of bachelor/master students), 20% is citations, 10% is faculty/student ratio (have a lot of non-teaching research staff? Well you get peer review, citations and a high faculty/student ratio, without any of that directly translating to students getting taught. Have a popular professor who teaches a wonderful class to 200 students instead of 100? Your rating on this variable just got halved.) And another 10% is international students/staff, which I think is super important in some ways (internationalisation of education is a big deal!) but can also be completely meaningless. i.e. a university which has amazing education and happens to be in a low-immigration country, isn't any less amazing.

In short, rankings differ wildly, rankings are crap, and rankings often don't say much about the quality of education. I can say this because I studied at a top 50 university, top 20 actually, as well as 3 other ones not ranked even in the top 100, and the top 20's quality of education wasn't remarkable (actually had the best grades with the least effort there, too). The difference? The top 50 uni had a load of money, reputation and had brilliant PhDs doing amazing research and got cited a lot, which did 0 for my education but everything for its reputation, the other ones simply had great education without deep and well funded PhD programs.

So what must you do? Look at educational outcomes. More importantly, not look at the top universities, either. Does it matter for a typical student to study in the US if Harvard is in the US when it only takes in 2.000 students per year? The answer is mostly no. 99% of the population goes to different schools, so let's look at them.

You'll find the US does quite poorly compared to the aforementioned European region of equivalent size. And you'll find that whereas in most of Europe education is free or de facto free. (e.g. in Germany, free, in France a few hundred bucks per year, in the Netherlands $2k but you get $2k from the government as a loan, which turns into a gift if you graduate, i.e. free etc) And average student debt is $35k for 2015 in the US.

Having universities like MIT or Harvard is important for point (8), being a leader in science, innovation etc etc. But it's not for point (9), quality of education for a normal person, at a particular cost. You can get better quality cheaper in Europe. My education in the Netherlands compared great with having studied in America, for example.

(10) It's really hard to compare nations, income is a particularly tricky one to rely on. My healthcare is free, my education is free, sports and arts are heavily subsidised, cities are built so I don't need a car etc etc. In short, you can get a much better standard of living with less money. Would you like if your income was $1m per year if your health insurance was $250k, your education was $250k etc? It's an exaggerated example but you get my point. I find if you talk to people who've lived in Western Europe and the US (like I did), that standards of living aren't better in the US.

Household debt to income is rarely used, it's household debt to disposable income. And that's my point, if my healthcare is paid for me for example, does it matter disposable income is a little less? It wildly varies, too. Countries that are usually wonderful to live in have high ratios (Denmark the highest, then the Netherlands, Switzerland of all places comes in fourth. Who comes in last? Slovenia, Poland, Slovak Republic. Not places you want to live. It also masks the fact that Net Household Wealth to Income in the Netherlands (remember, the 2nd worst country on your debt to disposable income rating) is much better than that in the US.) You also have to understand where it comes from and what it entails. Two thirds of household debt reduction in the US was because of defaults. So the number is low because the US had an epic fail, defaulted on the majority of debt reductions and lost people a lot of money. That's not a great situation is it? Beyond that it's important to look at the type of debt. In the US household debt consists of a lot of credit card debt (i.e. empty debt at ridiculous 20% interest rates per year.) In Europe it's a lot more because of recent housing price crashes (i.e. people owing the bank on much lower interest rates on long-term, asset-backed loans, whose value is forecasted to bounce back in the coming years as the housing market picks up as it did this year already). It's important to look into the statistics, I can name a million and one empty statistics that make the US look poor. For example the US owes a ridiculous shit ton of money, $18 trillion, people always like to say. But nobody mentions that the rest of the world owes the US about the same amount.

(11) I think everyone knows that crime rates in a typical American city aren't as good as those in a typical European city. Hell the notion that there are deep issues with even feeling safe around police in the US for substantial portions of the population is insane. I agree fully with you that if you want, you can find very safe cities to live in in the US. But that's cherry picking cities, and if I did that for any of the other points you mentioned it'd be easy peasy, that's why we're having a discussion about countries no?

(12) I just don't see how the US compares to Western Europe in this regard. I mean it's on a completely different scale. I'll cherry pick one number real quick if you allow... it's that the US shot and killed 59 people in the first 24 days of 2015. In the last 24 years, the England & Wales shot and killed fewer, 55. Just think about that. Police shot and killed more people in 0.33% of the time, despite the population being barely 6 times bigger. Or Iceland, a population that is bigger than that of Stockton, California. They had 1 fatal police shooting in 71 years. Stockton? 3 in the first 5 months of this year alone. In I mean I'm cherry picking here obviously but I really think you should scrap this point from your list, cause I can go on and on here and it gets worse.

(13) Absolutely ridiculous. I'm a minority in Europe, my girlfriend is a sociologist. From my experience and the academic perspective, social mobility in the US is not the best in the world, not even close.

(14) More of the same.

[0] http://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita