BE LIKE ESTONIA:

The history of great empires that have turned inward is not a happy one. The next president always needed to confront this -- but Covid-19 has shown that this insular U.S. has fallen much further behind than even pessimists appreciated. 

The global pandemic has been, among many things, a global test of government capacity. Last week Bloomberg News published its study of "virus resilience." The U.S. came in 18th of 53 nations. It would have been far lower, if not for its private sector's success in producing vaccines. On the basic Hobbesian test of keeping its people alive, the American Leviathan has failed.

The U.S. is closing in on 800 deaths for every million people. That is a slightly better record than Britain and Belgium, but it is far worse than most of its allies. Germany, with 170 deaths per million, has done six times better. But the really shocking comparative numbers come from East Asia, where plenty of governments that a generation ago looked across the Pacific to the U.S. as the great role model have now outperformed their erstwhile exemplar.

Japan has lost fewer than 2,000 people, or a hundredth of the U.S. death toll, despite having an elderly population and a supersized capital city. Taiwan has gone more than 200 days without a domestic case of Covid-19. Singapore is beating itself up because its mortality rate is edging close to five deaths per million.

Perhaps most pointedly of all, China is now almost back to work as normal. Even allowing for Beijing's sluggish start in dealing with the virus, and throwing in some skepticism about its official death toll of just three deaths per million, it has plainly been far better at protecting its people from dying than the U.S. And the rest of the world has seen it. 

There are two lame excuses for this -- both of which Biden should dismiss. The first is that high U.S. mortality rates are part of the price you pay for freedom and democracy. Though China's success certainly has something to do with autocracy, all the other countries at the top of the Covid-19 league tables are also freedom-loving democracies; they're just better-organized freedom-loving democracies than the U.S. For instance, New York City and Seoul are both lively cities with crowded subways and a wild nightlife. But New York has lost more than 22,000 people, while Seoul has lost a few dozen. 

East Asia's supremacy at Covid-19 was not a fluke. Look at the global rankings for high schools and health care: East Asian countries are clustering at the top alongside the Scandinavians. Or look at infrastructure. The gap between Asian airports and New York's La Guardia or JFK are obvious to any traveler, but just as striking is the gap in the underlying wiring: Some three-quarters of the world's "smart cities," which have updated their infrastructure for the internet age, are in Asia. 

For nearly 50 years, Asian countries, led by Singapore, have been quietly building smarter and better governments in the same way that Toyota and Honda once built smarter and better cars. The difference is that, while Detroit and the rest of U.S. industry eventually copied Japan's "lean manufacturing" so they could fight back, Washington's politicians have not copied Singaporean lean government; indeed, they barely know what it is.

The second excuse that Biden should dismiss is that America's failures are all Trump's fault. The outgoing president may have actively obstructed U.S. attempts to deal with Covid-19, but he did not create a health system that was designed to help the old and the rich, not the poor. A pandemic was always bound to expose that. All those people who died in New York City did so under a Democratic mayor and a Democratic governor. 

The same goes for many other things where the U.S. is falling behind the rest of the world. Trump said some unhelpful things after George Floyd's death, but he did not invent racist policing -- one of us covered the Rodney King riots nearly three decades ago. Polarized politics? Poor schools? A convoluted tax system? Trump hardly made any of these problems better, but the U.S. public sector started falling behind its peers long before he even became a reality TV star.

With a little reading, the president-elect could discover that other countries are doing plenty of clever things that the U.S. could copy. Formerly socialist Scandinavia is a world leader in contracting out parts of the public sector to the private sector, including in sensitive areas such as health care and education. Germany has an exemplary decentralized health system that covers everyone at a fraction of the cost of the U.S. system.

India has given every citizen -- more than a billion people -- a digital identity that can be used to deliver benefits to a population that has high levels of illiteracy. Tiny Estonia has made it possible to do a host of things online, including voting, filing tax returns, participating in the census and setting up businesses -- enough to save about 2% of gross domestic product through efficiency.  

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