Hardly any of these national sentiments and views are based on solid verifyable facts. The media in all countries understands well that any story about how the respective local nation outperforms some other nation makes even the most educated the reader feel good like a proudly praised child and releases all the pleasant chemicals in the readers brain necessary to cause him/her to buy the respective newspaper again in the future.
Both the media as well as governing politicians have a vested interest in flattering their audience with telling them the greatness of their country and any sort of scientifically sound measurement can be selected and presented in ways towards this end. The overall per-head economic performance in all G7 countries has differed in practice for the past two decades only in small single-digit percentages and larger statistical differences are usually caused by incompatible measurement techniques. But that's already far too boring to report or put into perspective, so all the focus remains on the eventually meaningless annual short-term �3% noise on GNPs and exchange rates. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
