Don’t look now, but the U.S. economy is outperforming all other richer countries — and it has been for a rather long time. That’s according to a new special report from The Economist Magazine titled “The envy of the world.”

While this may be the story that the data tell, it comes with plenty of caveats — ones that the American people will surely recognize.

Simon Rabinovitch is U.S. economics editor at The Economist. He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio about this. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: So, what — we’re doing so well, apparently, the world admires us? Tell me more.

Simon Rabinovitch: It is one of these things that — on the one hand — it’s not a big secret. You could look at the data, really, at any point going back to the early 1990s and arrive at a similar conclusion. But on the other hand, the U.S. is sometimes a little bit inward-looking, a little bit self-obsessed, and so it doesn’t necessarily look at itself relative to other countries — especially relative to other developed, advanced economies. And when you do look at it in that comparative basis, the story is that, certainly since COVID — so over the last three or four years — the recovery in America has been much stronger than in virtually any other advanced economy. But going back to the early 1990s, as well, that outperformance really is quite striking.

Brancaccio: Is it you or me going to tell the U.S. electorate that we’re doing so well?

Rabinovitch: Well, I guess it’s one of these things where people can’t necessarily be told this kind of thing. I mean, you can try to tell them, but ultimately, people will believe their own reality, what they see in front of them. And so obviously, for a lot of voters, you know, the No. 1 concern over the last number of years has been inflation. And they’re not necessarily looking at, you know, what was U.S. Q3 GDP versus Britain’s Q3 GDP. That’s not the kind of thing that’s going to bring the bacon home.

Brancaccio: Well, it’s quite striking in the report — do I have this right? Average wages in America’s lowest income state — that would be Mississippi — are higher than the average wages in Britain, Canada, even Germany?

Rabinovitch: That’s right, and that seems surprising. Now, there are some caveats: So one is that average is average, which means that if you have high income inequality — as America does have, as Mississippi does have — then the median wage is going to be lower than the average wage. So inequality is clearly a problem in America. And, also, if you look at some outcomes beyond the economy, things like longevity — which matter, which really are an important reflection of how a system of government is performing — America is lagging other countries in the world. Much of that has to do with political choices about what kind of health care system a country has or what kind of gun controls a country has. And I suppose you might say the tragedy is that, given how well the economy has done in America, the government does have far greater capacity to address things such as inequality, to address basic social policies that could really translate into better livelihoods for Americans kind of lower down the income ladder. The ability is there, so the economic capacity exists. It’s really a question of of political will.

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