For an American, a first visit to Australia has a bit of a Star Trek feel to it: like being teleported to a planet with an alternate USA. The land is just as breathtakingly beautiful; the people every bit as friendly and welcoming. But close up, everything seemingly familiar turns out to be different.

The plants and trees are actually species you have never seen before. The fauna too is unlike anything back home (their deer-like creatures, for example, are called “kangaroos”). And despite initial impressions of sameness, their society is upon closer inspection unlike ours in profound, important respects.

Take a long stroll around downtown Melbourne, say, or Sydney Harbor: After a while, an American will put his finger on that important difference. These places are lacking in “the New Misery” we have become so accustomed to in the States over the past generation—lacking, at least, in the measure we’ve come to expect in major cities in our own country.

“Missing” from the Australian urban landscape: the homeless encampments; the aromas of pot and pee; the garbage strewn around parks and public spaces; the graffiti; the fear of crime. Those touristic soundings are not without a deeper significance.

Australia has not been entirely spared the New Misery. Some aspects of it—family breakdown; welfare dependency—are very much part of modern Australian life, too. So too, as in the rest of the Anglo-sphere, the ugly creep of Woke Ideology and Left Censorship of speech. (If you know anything about the “George Pell affair”—the persecution, railroading, and imprisonment of the aged Cardinal who may be one of Australia’s holiest men—you’ll appreciate how very fragile religious liberty and due process can be in Oz today.[1])

All that said: Australia seems to have avoided much of what has gone so painfully wrong in the real America—the one half-a-planet away—over the past three decades. Practically everywhere an American visitor goes, Australia seems to have done better promoting prosperity and popular well-being—much better, in fact.

Official statistics back up these touristic impressions. Two particularly meaningful indicators underscore the striking divergence in national fortunes for contemporary Australia and America.

First: the most basic measure of life chances, life expectancy itself.

In 1989—the year the Berlin Wall fell—life expectancy in Australia was a only bit higher than in the US: about a year and a half greater. Thirty years later—on the eve of the COVID pandemic—the gap was well over four years. (Given COVID’s especially brutal toll on the USA, that gap would be even wider today.)

Second: “median net worth”—not average net worth for the population as a whole, but rather the net worth registered midway between top and bottom in society. Median net worth provides a much clearer picture of overall prosperity as experienced by the general public.

The Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report provides estimates of median wealth per adult for the Australia and the US, and almost 170 other countries, for the period stretching from 2000 to 2021.[2]

In 2000, according to those estimates, median wealth per adult in America and Australia were quite close, with Australia’s just a little higher. By 2021, the Australia-US gap in median wealth per adult was almost $200,000—in American money. Australia’s median adult wealth was nearly three times as high as America’s by 2021.

These figures are not inflation adjusted, by the way—if they were, we’d see real US median net worth per adult was scarcely higher in 2019 (before the great COVID transfer payments spree) than in 2000, almost two decades earlier.

America was not just falling behind Australia. The US has also been faltering against Britain, Canada, even New Zealand—all the rest of the affluent Anglo-sphere. Given our common cultural and political heritage, these four countries are our most meaningful comparators for socioeconomic performance.

Americans might want to look at those two charts long and hard. Not just the trends themselves, but their very specific historical context.

By some fateful twist, the US began to lose this race for national flourishing at the very moment when it won the Cold War—and emerged as the world’s sole, unrivaled Superpower.

Understanding just what went wrong in America in the post-Cold War era—and how to revitalize our nation—ought to be, accordingly, the commanding task before us.

[1] Australia’s highest court eventually sprung Pell and denounced the state’s case against him as a travesty.

On this scandal: see Keith Winschuttle, The Persecution of George Pell (Balman NSW: Quadrant Books, 2020). Or try to see it. Amazon doesn’t (won’t?) sell it. Nor EBay.

[2] This is pioneering work still in progress; its findings should be regarded as still provisional or even experimental for some countries, though we can be fairly confident about the estimates here.

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