Population: 68,711,343
GDP: $848 billion (1980 estimate)
Capital: Los Angeles
Government: Constitutional Federal Presidential Republic
Official Language: English
Following WWII, the United States was forced to accept a new standard of living. Having lost a great bulk of manufacturing power as well as the majority of its population, this new nation strove ahead to remake its economic and cultural image in the aftermath. A new capital was founded at LA, the most populous city west of the Mississippi. The nation also accepted a new role as standard bearer as a creator of electronics, hardware, software, entertainment, and a leader in cultural creation.
Due to acceptance of the Treaty of Paris, which specified a removal of all trade barriers (1966 or 34 DR), the majority of American companies began moving manufacturing to Mexico in order to bring down manufacturing costs in order to compete economically with the Germanic Union.
A great deal of government capital was saved due to the restrictions placed on the American government in regards to military size. With the inability to invest in a sizable military, the United States instead invested in education and technology allowing for a surge in knowledge and leadership in the fields of computers and electronics. This in turn led to revolutionary breakthroughs in the personal computer, operational systems, the internet, and such electronic breakthroughs as the walkman, the VCR, and the CD.
The American automotive industry proved the leading model in fuel efficency and power. This was due to the limitations placed on the American market via German control of oil. The American automotive industry was forced to compete and developed models able to function efficiently. American cars became the leading model sold internationally despite German attempts to compete.
A tighter partnership with Mexico was developed as American corporations established numerous manufacturing plants inside Mexican boundaries. A symbiotic relationship developed between the two countries leading to an easing of border crossing restrictions allowing for a surge of Mexican nationals into the United States to serve as migrant laborers further lowering costs despite the anger this inspired in American citizens. The two nations soon signed a favored nation treaty with one another in order to even out their business arrangements. Talks of possible union have been ongoing for the last several years.
Transportation
As of 1980, there were 759 automobiles per 1,000 Americans, compared to 472 per 1,000 inhabitants of the Germanic Union the following year. Approximately 39% of personal vehicles are vans or light trucks. The average American adult (accounting for all drivers and nondrivers) spends 55 minutes behind the wheel every day, driving 29 miles (47 km). The U.S. intercity passenger rail system is relatively weak. Only 9% of total U.S. work trips employ mass transit, compared to 38.8% in Europe. Bicycle usage is minimal, well below European levels. The civil airline industry is entirely privatized, while most major airports are publicly owned.
Energy
The United States energy market is 8,000 terawatt hours per year. Energy consumption per capita is 2.9 tons of oil equivalent per year. In 1980, 40% of the nation's energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear power and various renewable energy sources. For decades, nuclear power has played a limited role relative to many other developed countries. Recently, applications for new nuclear plants have been filed.
As of 1980, there were 759 automobiles per 1,000 Americans, compared to 472 per 1,000 inhabitants of the Germanic Union the following year. Approximately 39% of personal vehicles are vans or light trucks. The average American adult (accounting for all drivers and nondrivers) spends 55 minutes behind the wheel every day, driving 29 miles (47 km). The U.S. intercity passenger rail system is relatively weak. Only 9% of total U.S. work trips employ mass transit, compared to 38.8% in Europe. Bicycle usage is minimal, well below European levels. The civil airline industry is entirely privatized, while most major airports are publicly owned.
Energy
The United States energy market is 8,000 terawatt hours per year. Energy consumption per capita is 2.9 tons of oil equivalent per year. In 1980, 40% of the nation's energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear power and various renewable energy sources. For decades, nuclear power has played a limited role relative to many other developed countries. Recently, applications for new nuclear plants have been filed.
Education
American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. Children are required in most states to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn eighteen (generally bringing them through 12th grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at sixteen or seventeen. About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled. The United States has many competitive private and public institutions of higher education, as well as local community colleges of varying quality with open admission policies. Of Americans twenty-five and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees. The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.
American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. Children are required in most states to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn eighteen (generally bringing them through 12th grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at sixteen or seventeen. About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled. The United States has many competitive private and public institutions of higher education, as well as local community colleges of varying quality with open admission policies. Of Americans twenty-five and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees. The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.
Health
The American life expectancy of 77.8 years at birth is a year shorter than the overall figure in the Germanic Union. The infant mortality rate of 6.37 per thousand likewise places the United States behind the Germanic Union. U.S. cancer survival rates are the highest in the world. The U.S. adolescent pregnancy rate, 79.8 per 1,000 women, is nearly four times that of France and five times that of Germany. Abortion in the United States, legal on demand, is a source of great political controversy. Many states ban public funding of the procedure and have laws to restrict late-term abortions, require parental notification for minors, and mandate a waiting period prior to treatment. While the incidence of abortion is in decline, the U.S. abortion ratio of 241 per 1,000 live births and abortion rate of 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 remain higher than those of the Germanic Union.
The United States healthcare system far outspends any other nation's, measured in both per capita spending and percentage of GDP. Unlike most developed countries, the U.S. healthcare system is not universal, and relies on a higher proportion of private funding. In 1980, private insurance paid for 36% of personal health expenditure, private out-of-pocket payments covered 15%, and federal, state, and local governments paid for 44%. The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. healthcare system in 1980 as first in responsiveness, but 5th in overall performance. The United States is a leader in medical innovation. In 1979, the U.S. nonindustrial sector spent three times as much as Europe per capita on biomedical research. Medical bills are the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States. In 1980, 10.9 million Americans, or 15.9% of the population, were uninsured. The primary cause of the decline in coverage is the drop in the number of Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance, which fell from 62.6% in 1975 to 59.5% in 1980.
The American life expectancy of 77.8 years at birth is a year shorter than the overall figure in the Germanic Union. The infant mortality rate of 6.37 per thousand likewise places the United States behind the Germanic Union. U.S. cancer survival rates are the highest in the world. The U.S. adolescent pregnancy rate, 79.8 per 1,000 women, is nearly four times that of France and five times that of Germany. Abortion in the United States, legal on demand, is a source of great political controversy. Many states ban public funding of the procedure and have laws to restrict late-term abortions, require parental notification for minors, and mandate a waiting period prior to treatment. While the incidence of abortion is in decline, the U.S. abortion ratio of 241 per 1,000 live births and abortion rate of 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 remain higher than those of the Germanic Union.
The United States healthcare system far outspends any other nation's, measured in both per capita spending and percentage of GDP. Unlike most developed countries, the U.S. healthcare system is not universal, and relies on a higher proportion of private funding. In 1980, private insurance paid for 36% of personal health expenditure, private out-of-pocket payments covered 15%, and federal, state, and local governments paid for 44%. The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. healthcare system in 1980 as first in responsiveness, but 5th in overall performance. The United States is a leader in medical innovation. In 1979, the U.S. nonindustrial sector spent three times as much as Europe per capita on biomedical research. Medical bills are the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States. In 1980, 10.9 million Americans, or 15.9% of the population, were uninsured. The primary cause of the decline in coverage is the drop in the number of Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance, which fell from 62.6% in 1975 to 59.5% in 1980.
Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police and sheriff's departments, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties. At the federal level and in almost every state, jurisprudence operates on a common law system. State courts conduct most criminal trials; federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as appeals from state systems.
Among developed nations, the United States has above-average levels of violent crime and particularly high levels of gun violence and homicide. In 1978, there were 5.7 murders per 100,000 persons. The U.S. homicide rate, which decreased by 42% between 1963 and 1971, has been roughly steady since. Some scholars have associated the high rate of homicide with the country's high rates of gun ownership, in turn associated with U.S. gun laws which are very permissive compared to those of other developed countries.
Culture
The United States is a multicultural nation, home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values. There is no "American" ethnicity; aside from the now relatively small Native American population, nearly all Americans or their ancestors immigrated within the past five centuries. The culture held in common by the majority of Americans is referred to as mainstream American culture, a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of Western European migrants, beginning with the early English and Dutch settlers. German, Irish, and Scottish cultures have also been very influential. Certain cultural attributes of Mandé and Wolof slaves from West Africa were adopted by the American mainstream; based more on the traditions of Central African Bantu slaves, a distinct African American culture developed that would eventually have a major effect on the mainstream as well. Westward expansion integrated the Creoles and Cajuns of Louisiana and the Hispanos of the Southwest and brought close contact with the culture of Mexico. Large-scale immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Southern and Eastern Europe introduced many new cultural elements. More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has had broad impact. The resulting mix of cultures may be characterized as a homogeneous melting pot or as a pluralistic salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.
The United States is a multicultural nation, home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values. There is no "American" ethnicity; aside from the now relatively small Native American population, nearly all Americans or their ancestors immigrated within the past five centuries. The culture held in common by the majority of Americans is referred to as mainstream American culture, a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of Western European migrants, beginning with the early English and Dutch settlers. German, Irish, and Scottish cultures have also been very influential. Certain cultural attributes of Mandé and Wolof slaves from West Africa were adopted by the American mainstream; based more on the traditions of Central African Bantu slaves, a distinct African American culture developed that would eventually have a major effect on the mainstream as well. Westward expansion integrated the Creoles and Cajuns of Louisiana and the Hispanos of the Southwest and brought close contact with the culture of Mexico. Large-scale immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Southern and Eastern Europe introduced many new cultural elements. More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has had broad impact. The resulting mix of cultures may be characterized as a homogeneous melting pot or as a pluralistic salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.
While American culture maintains that the United States is a classless society, economists and sociologists have identified cultural differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values. The American middle and professional class has been the source of many contemporary social trends such as feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism. Americans' self-images, social viewpoints, and cultural expectations are associated with their occupations to an unusually close degree. While Americans tend greatly to value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is generally seen as a positive attribute. Though the American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, played a key role in attracting immigrants, particularly in the late 1800s, some analysts find that the United States has less social mobility than Western Europe and Canada.
Women, many of whom were formerly more limited to domestic roles, now mostly work outside the home and receive a majority of bachelor's degrees. The changing role of women has also changed the American family. In 1980, no household arrangement defined more than 30% of households; married childless couples were most common, at 28%.
Popular media
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography to capture motion. In 1894, the world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The next year saw the first commercial screening of a projected film, also in New York, and the United States was in the forefront of sound film's development in the following decades. Since the early twentieth century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, California. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of film grammar and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time. American screen actors like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising. The major film studios of Hollywood are the primary source of the most commercially successful movies in the world, such as Star Wars (1977) and the products of Hollywood today dominate the global film industry.
Americans are the heaviest television viewers in the world, and the average time spent in front of the screen continues to rise, hitting five hours a day in 1980. The four major broadcast networks are all commercial entities. Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercialized, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography to capture motion. In 1894, the world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The next year saw the first commercial screening of a projected film, also in New York, and the United States was in the forefront of sound film's development in the following decades. Since the early twentieth century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, California. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of film grammar and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time. American screen actors like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising. The major film studios of Hollywood are the primary source of the most commercially successful movies in the world, such as Star Wars (1977) and the products of Hollywood today dominate the global film industry.
Americans are the heaviest television viewers in the world, and the average time spent in front of the screen continues to rise, hitting five hours a day in 1980. The four major broadcast networks are all commercial entities. Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercialized, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.
The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the twentieth century. Country music, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll emerged between the 1920s and 1950s. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's greatest songwriters. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley have become global celebrities.
Literature, philosophy, and the arts
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the nineteenth century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is recognized as another essential American poet. Eleven U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Toni Morrison in 1993. Ernest Hemingway, the 1954 Nobel laureate, is often named as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel." Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. Postmodernism is the most recent major literary movement in the world, and though on the theory side postmodernism began with French writers like Jacques Derrida and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and was transitioned into largely by Irish writer Samuel Beckett, it has since been dominated by American writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, John Barth, E.L. Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut and many others.
The transcendentalists, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the twentieth century, the work of W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty helped bring analytic philosophy to the fore in U.S. academic circles.
In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was an important mid-nineteenth-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene. Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new styles, displaying a highly individualistic sensibility. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein have developed largely in the Americas. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has also brought American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry to the top of their field.
One of the first notable promoters of the nascent American theater was impresario P. T. Barnum, who began operating a lower Manhattan entertainment complex in 1841. The team of Harrigan and Hart produced a series of popular musical comedies in New York starting in the late 1870s. In the twentieth century, the modern musical form emerged on Broadway; the songs of musical theater composers such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim have become pop standards. Playwright Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel literature prize in 1936; other acclaimed U.S. dramatists include multiple Pulitzer Prize winners Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and August Wilson.
Though largely overlooked at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition; other experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created an identifiably American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a unique American synthesis of popular and classical music. Choreographers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham were central figures in the creation of modern dance; George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins were leaders in twentieth-century ballet. The United States has long been at the fore in the relatively modern artistic medium of photography, with major practitioners such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams, and many others. The newspaper comic strip and the comic book are both U.S. innovations. Superman, the quintessential comic book superhero, has become an American icon.
Food
Mainstream American culinary arts are similar to those in parts of the Germanic Union. Wheat is the primary cereal grain. Traditional American cuisine uses ingredients such as turkey, white-tailed deer venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup, indigenous foods employed by Native Americans and early European settlers. Slow-cooked pork and beef barbecue, crab cakes, potato chips, and chocolate chip cookies are distinctively American styles. Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed. Americans generally prefer coffee to tea. Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.
Sports
Since the late nineteenth century, baseball has been regarded as the national sport; American football, basketball, and ice hockey are the country's three other leading professional team sports. College football and basketball also attract large audiences. Football is now by several measures the most popular spectator sport in the United States. Boxing and horse racing are the most watched individual sports. Soccer, though not a leading professional sport in the country, is played widely at the youth and amateur levels. Tennis and many outdoor sports are also popular.
SOURCE: SS Factbook
