Adam Bonica, last week:

Americans work longer hours, pay more out-of-pocket for college and childcare, lack parental leave, and enjoy less economic mobility. The share of income going to the top 1 percent is nearly double the OECD [the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] average. American CEOs earn, on average, 354 times as much as their workers. More workers are trapped in poverty-wage jobs. Collective bargaining covers fewer workers. And social protections are less generous for those who fall on hard times, with the government raising less in taxes and spending more on the military.

The economy is just the beginning.

We spend nearly twice as much on healthcare as other wealthy countries do. Yet life expectancy is well below average, infant and maternal mortality rates are alarmingly high, and more Americans remain uninsured.

This article came up over lunch with some friends as we lamented the greed of America’s billionaires, who would rather leave California than pay an additional 5% of their assets—an amount they’d hardly miss, from assets which in the last year have often risen by more than the tax they’d owe.

If billionaires were willing to settle for ever-so-slightly-less excessive wealth, the lives of non-billionaire Americans could be improved immensely.

Universal healthcare is not some utopian fantasy. It is Tuesday in Toronto. Affordable higher education is not an impossible dream. It is Wednesday in Berlin. Sensible gun regulation is not a violation of natural law. It is Thursday in London. Paid parental leave is not radical. It is Friday in Tallinn, and Monday in Tokyo, and every day in between.

There is another America inside this one, visible in the statistics of nations that made different choices. Call it Latent America: the nation that would exist if our democracy functioned to serve the public rather than protect the already powerful.

To see this, you need only compare outcomes in the US with its peers. The graphic below illustrates a simple thought experiment: What would happen if the United States simply matched the average performance of our 31 peer nations in the OECD? We don’t need to become a shining city on a hill to transform Americans’ lives. We just need to become average.

Bonica includes a set of charts that illustrate what becoming “average” looks like. For example:

• $19,000 more income, and $96,000 more wealth per household
• 26 million more people with health insurance, and $2.1 trillion less in annual healthcare spending
• 25 weeks of guaranteed paid new parental leave (up from zero leave)
• 5 million fewer children in poverty
• 10,000 fewer infant deaths, and a 76% drop in maternal deaths during childbirth
• 35,000 fewer gun deaths a year, and 99% fewer school shootings

There are so many more potential societal improvements, just from America achieving the average of its thirty-one wealthy democratic peers.

Bonica’s argument is inherently optimistic, seeing the comparisons to our peers and the moment we’re in—the shameless corruption, the dismantling of institutions, the dehumanization—not as pointing to an ending, but as “a set of solutions waiting to be implemented.”

Via Jason Kottke, who observes:

Imagine if the US took its exceptionalism seriously and tried to maximally improve the lives of its citizens & residents instead of generating, as Bonica puts it, “enormous prosperity while deliberately withholding it from those who need it most”.

I may not fully share Bonica’s optimism, but the alternative is to believe that America is simply incapable of achieving what so many of its peers already have. If Americans truly believe in American Exceptionalism, then we must all demand more of our politicians, our billionaires, and ourselves.