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To see the future we want to create, we just have to look outside of our own borders.

By David Swanson

I hope everyone in the world reads the new book Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe by Natasha Hakimi Zapata. I think the lessons could be for anywhere on Earth. They are stories of what is possible for the United States (or in some cases a single state thereof) or most anywhere else. But they are also stories of what is already real in certain parts of the world.

To some limited and shrinking extent, states within the United States model successful policies that other states learn from and emulate. If you scroll down this website, you find a growing number of states banning the death penalty, fixing the minimum wage, etc. But the models of successful public policies have always been most dramatic at the level of nations, and the learning of lessons by other nations amazingly limited. Instead of the United States, for example, learning from European investment in human and social needs, Europe is “learning” to shift its resources into war and war preparations on the U.S. model.

In Another World Is Possible, we have not just the positive trends among wealthy nations, from which the United States is usually a sad outlier, but the very best of the best from anywhere on Earth. The examples, surveyed in detail, flaws and all, include: the UK’s healthcare system, Norway’s family leave, Singapore’s housing, Finland’s schools, Portugal’s drug policies, Estonia’s internet policies, Uruguay’s renewable energy, Costa Rica’s biodiversity law, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s pensions. These stories of success, of the struggles that were needed and of the benefits that have resulted, are absolutely stunning. And while we ought to be capable of knowing that even better is possible, people are often best persuaded by the established fact of something having already been done. And there are many lessons to be learned here about the details — where the wonder or the failure often lies.

overgrown buildings around the chernobyl reactor

On those rare occasions when a U.S. gaze is directed outside a border, a few very familiar excuses are ready to hand: The United States is too big! The United States is too diverse! The United States has its own superior way of doing things! Zapata debunks some of this explicitly, and more of it through the examples she provides. There’s no evidence supporting the excuses. There’s no connection at all between a society’s “diversity” and its choice of whether to treat healthcare as a right or as a means of profiting certain campaign funders.

It is true that the U.S. public is in many ways divided and conquered along lines of race and wealth and political party and so on. But the lesson for overcoming that is also hiding in these success stories. Every one of them possesses the key secret ingredient, which is not proper targeting, not means testing, not public options, but universality. Universality creates no stigma for those receiving something, and no resentment from those not (there is no such group). Universality avoids the costly and massive bureaucratic inefficiency of determining who is worthy. It builds solidarity, and encourages a politics in which larger groups can unite to make further changes. It discourages, not just resentment of actual beneficiaries, but also irrational prejudice against particular groups benefitting or imagined to be benefitting. It strengthens support for maintaining a program into the future, rather than opening up the means to chip away at it until it’s gone.

As the Earth is rocked by the catastrophes of climate collapse, exacerbated by war, wealth concentration, and willful ignorance, it’s hard not to feel that there is tragedy in accounts of how well things are done in certain corners of our world — of how well we could all be if best practices were spread instead of disease pandemics and weapons. But these accounts can also be read as inspiration for the work that is desperately needed. And contained in Another World Is Possible are examples of learning. Many countries have learned, for example, from the UK’s healthcare system. In fact, arguably only one major wealthy country hasn’t.

Successes can be learned from and adapted as needed. Norway and Finland seem to treat children as if they live in a world that is safe for them to freely wander. That might be premature in some U.S. neighborhoods. But these successful public policies, taken as a package, do not just succeed in their separate limited spheres. If the United States were to copy (there are no copyrights!) the best policies in the world for education and healthcare and family leave and housing, etc., it would be creating a safer place, for a lower price tag and with fewer negative side-effects than it achieves with militarized police, prisons, tests, and surveillance.

Some successes will require ongoing innovation. But if there is endless debate in the United States about online rights and privacy and security and free speech, and we’ve been reduced to xenophobic censorship and billionaire gatekeepers, while there’s a giant glowing solution to many of the basic dilemmas sitting on public display in Estonia, why not at least look at it? If Los Angeles is burning from causes being enthusiastically worsened, and Uruguay has found a way out, it may be true that the United States is not the same size or shape or have the same natural features or population as Uruguay (and its residents may use tons more energy than do residents of Uruguay), but why not at least look at it?

Why not at least try, as long as we understand that another world is possible?

Environment and the Green New Deal Militarism and Foreign Policy