America's Overrated/Underrated
Presidents, paprika, and science
What better way to celebrate America than to criticize its self-image? Who’s overrated? Underrated? Let’s argue.1
Norman Borlaug - Bro grew the food supply enough to prevent a billion people from starving. Potentially the most consequential person of the 20th century, from the standpoint of lives. Literally made overpopulation irrelevant. The consummate utilitarian; could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot people for years and still be a moral saint. Despite all that, I hadn’t heard of him until very recently.
George H.W. Bush - We weren’t alive to see it, but this CV man. The Soviet Union collapses and it goes over smoothly. Iraq launches an insane war in Kuwait and the president actually rallies the international community to go in and cleanly defeat them, which they achieve in 42 days. When push came to shove, he was actually willing to reverse course and raise taxes, setting the Clinton administration up for budgetary success. Cap-and-trade to eliminate acid rain. Free trade with the US and Canada. Massive immigration expansion. The Americans with Disabilities Act. Hell, he backed a rudimentary public option that ticks most liberal boxes for healthcare reform today.
The objections, including the Iran-Contra pardons and Clarence Thomas, are good ones. But they don’t come close to outweighing the liberal character of the administration as a whole. Quite underrated, potentially the best one-term president.
College Basketball - Everyone loves college football, but the atmosphere of good college ball eats the NBA alive. If you’re into basketball, try reallocating more of your live-sports budget. Cheap tickets too!
Food - America was weighed down by “fast food” throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Technological advancements in transportation and a lack of immigration in the first half of the 20th contributed to rock bottom standards that accepted things like TV dinners and Denny’s artificial syrup’d pancakes.
Recently, I have been extremely impressed. Increased immigration (another reason why Biden is underrated) has generated increased appreciation for quality Mexican and other Latin American cuisines, especially outside of sun belt states that had this quality already. Northern states now have a taste for high-quality fast food options like Sweet Green and Shake Shack. Much of the higher standards are concentrated among Gen Z and millennials, especially those who live in cities, that have become quite accustomed to going out to a nice breakfast spot with fresh fruit and baked goods, eating ramen or pho for lunch, and having some birria tacos for dinner. Of course, not everyone is rich enough to do that everyday, but it is more common then it used to be.
Apps like Beli have piggybacked on this trend by allowing you to rank restaurants and share with your ratings with everyone else. This all makes sense, eating out is a normal good, and Americans have gotten richer with time.
Verdict: American eating habits are underrated, especially abroad, because the 1970’s diet has been crystalized in many people’s minds.
However, Americans still have a lot to learn about cooking food. Here’s a fast-paced list of under-overs for the kitchen.
Paprika is slightly overrated, smoked paprika is underrated. Black pepper is incredibly overrated; it does not belong at the table next to salt, which is massively more important. There are also 6 or 7 spices better than black pepper, too, as black pepper usually overshadows the base flavours. Citric acid is underrated outside of Mexican-influenced states, most recipes need more of it, especially Italian-made dishes. Flour tortillas are overrated, corn tortillas are massively underrated outside of those same states again. Sour cream and ranch are overrated, again, overshadowing flavour. If you don’t have much flavour to begin with, throw sour cream on it. If you do, it’s a travesty.
Greek yogurt is slightly overrated, Icelandic yogurt is slight under rated, Balkan yogurt is massively underrated. Reason: Greek has better texture, but Balkan is sweeter and fruitier. And sometimes I like drinking it instead. Thinking of North Macedonian style here. Staying on dairy, American cheese and nacho cheese are surprisingly still overrated. See movie theatre and Super Bowl nachos for evidence. Cumin is underrated; much better on eggs than black pepper is. Cream is overrated; butter or high-quality cheese is underrated. Think mac and cheese, lasagna. Cream’s job is almost always to take away, not add.
Jimi Hendrix - Among guitarists, he is perfectly rated. (The goat) Among everybody else, he is severely underrated. Perhaps the way to phrase it is to say he is a perfectly rated guitarist, but a severely underrated musician. You say: “Proof? Just because you’re a Jimi fan doesn’t make him underrated.”
Okay, here are a list of artists that are much worse then Hendrix that have double or more monthly Spotify listeners: Queen, The Rolling Stones, ELO, Bowie, CCR, Fleetwood Mac, (I could go on)
The Stones are good at making catchy riffs. But when I listen to the Stones, I rarely hear new things. Similar things can be said about most other artists. The same cannot be said of Hendrix. Use of the wah wah, distortion, feedback, his fret work with thumb over bars and the magical “Hendrix major chord” allowed him to dip into Mississippi delta blues or Brit psychedelia as easily as brushing his teeth. The guy wished he could make love to his guitar instead of women. He was rarely seen without it hanging from his shoulder.
What more can I say? He’s one of the greats, but barely gets listened to nowadays. Queen and Fleetwood Mac harvest more casual streams because their songs sit neatly in algorithmic playlists, but it’s undeniable that Hendrix’s musical skill and innovation in guitar vocabulary put him outside the same conversation as these artists. Jimi is the Wright brothers, everyone else is Southwest Airlines. In Cowenese: Jimi expanded the production-possibility frontier of rock. Queen, the Stones, Fleetwood Mac, etc. re-optimized within that expanded set. That’s valuable, sure, but Hendrix had a first mover advantage, the rest consequently have lower marginal product.
Hendrix innovated on the electric guitar more then anybody, sure, but he is more than just a guitar player. He is up there with the great American musical geniuses like Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding… Treat him as such, America.
Hudson River School - Gorgeous landscapes, though I lack the art history to give any sort of technical analysis. All visual art is underrated. Check some of these out—and try to see the real world like they did for just a few minutes today:
Andrew Jackson - Overrated! You get a lot of points for threatening South Carolina into submission and delaying the Civil War by 30 years. If it had been fought during the Jackson admin, it would have been over tariffs and you wouldn’t have seen abolition. That means you either get a second civil war later on, increasing the bloodshed, or slavery dies slowly state-by-state, likely stretching into the 1870s and 1880s.
But Jackson went and squandered all of this goodwill by curbstomping Congress and the Supreme Court. His legacy is primarily the empowerment of the presidency. He became a champion of economic illiteracy, going to war with the central bank to stick it to the coastal elites. Many doubt the significance of this, but few, if any, defend it as a welfare enhancing move. It was part of a broader populist strategy that devoted more energy to punishing enemies (see: Native Americans) than to improving the lot of the nation. In a phrase: negative-sum politics.
This used to be a hotter take, with Jackson ranking as high as 5th in the presidential historian’s all-time list. The damage that presidential power creep has wrought is better acknowledged today, as is the nasty business which was the Trail of Tears.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy - The guy’s reputation, peddled along by charisma, martyrdom, and retro polling glory, runs far, far ahead of his measurable output.
He should get no credit for defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis, as his Bay of Pigs invasion started that mess to begin with. He said things about race, but when all was set and done, he never got his bills passed through congress. Who did? LBJ. He said things about Medicare too. But again, LBJ was the one who got it through congress, not JFK.
Increased funding for NASA is an ambitious move that paid off, and I love that. But overall, the guy is sitting at a 90% approval rate. The highest of any president ever. Verdict: incredibly overrated.
New Orleans - You’ve got French, American, and Spanish history; jazz, blues, and R&B; open-air drinking on the streets; radiant colours; and a distinctive spin on the southern palate. As a traveller, I think it’s the best city in the country.
James K. Polk - Criminally underrated. He promised a few ambitious things in just one term. Territorial expansion to the Pacific, the acquisition of the southwest, cutting tariffs, recreating the independent treasury, and leaving after one term. Surprisingly, he did every single one of these. Britain was bargained down to the 49th parallel,n(securing Washington and Oregon and Montana) Mexico was provoked and beaten, California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas were all added to the union, the Walker Tariff of 1846 slashed average rates from 32 % to 25 %, and in 1846 the independent treasury was created so that the government didn’t have to store it’s funding in private banks. And importantly, he honoured his promise not to seek a 2nd term, an incredibly admirable move.
The Mexican-American War is the obvious counterargument here. Many think that’s the weak point of this list. I think it’s his highlight. Abraham Lincoln had to kill 620,000 Americans to win the Civil War. Roosevelt was 400,000. WW1 was 116,000. Vietnam was 58, Korea was 36, even the war of 1812 was higher, with 20,000 deaths. Meanwhile, Polk only led to 13,000 deaths, which of course is a tragedy; they all are. But Polk passes the cost-benefit test better than most if not all of the others.
Compared to Korea, Vietnam, 1812, and WW1, the Mexican American war lost less soldiers while gaining way more. California has given the world Fairchild Semiconductor, which invented the first commercially practicable integrated circuit, intel, which invented 4004, the world’s first single-chip microprocessor, (1971) Nvidia, which coined and shipped the first mass-market GPU, (1999)... Okay, need I go on? Apple, Google, Tesla, SpaceX, Netflix, Pixar, Open AI, The Disney company, DoorDash, Uber, all of Hollywood! California is the 5th largest economy in the world, and it has created vast amounts of wealth and happiness for the world. Arizona and New Mexico are nice too, I guess. And Texas is Texas.
The point is that I’m a California nationalist the new Nobel winners, Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson show that long-run growth follows property rights, impartial courts, and broad access to political power. After 1848 the new territories immediately adopted U.S. constitutional protections (jury trials, homestead land titles, later the 14th Amendment), whereas Mexico struggled with frequent suspension of its 1857 constitution and militarized politics, or in other words, its government is highly dysfunctional and unconducive to human flourishing, comparatively. Is it even necessary to add the sentence that everyone already knows is true? I guess I will for the sake of the unconvinced.
Towns split by the modern U.S.–Mexico line—e.g., Nogales, Sonora vs. Nogales, Arizona, obviously share climate and culture but diverge sharply in income, an obvious example of institutional impact. There you go.
I will also add that the U.S. government had the state capacity to build giant infrastructure projects such as the L.A. aqueduct in 1913, which let a few hundred thousand people grow into millions, the Central Valley water projects in the 40s which helped feed the world and had 100x returns, and so on.
That’s not completely Mexican’s fault, Spain’s style of colonialism is partly to blame, but either way you explain it, the acquisition of the Sun Belt was one of the single best events in the history of human welfare, not just for the happy inhabitants of the area, but for the rest of the world too.
He’s usually ranked around 18 or 14 by presidential historians, so I declare underrated.
The Roosevelts - The case against FDR is the familiar case against much of the New Deal. Second World War leaders are overrated everywhere, but FDR, uniquely among them, gets a substantial portion of his credit for his domestic agenda, enacted during the Depression. There’s little theory or evidence to support the rosier interpretations of the New Deal, and weakening such a major peg of the FDR legacy must necessarily lead us into overrated territory.
Less known is the case against Teddy Roosevelt, who is widely beloved regardless of partisan affiliation. But it’s even more clear cut. His legacy is the imperial presidency. That overshadows the rest of his impact, because offices are more than their most moral officeholders.
Smartphones
The skill premium is declining. One reason?
“This is especially true for those jobs that require the rudimentary use of technology. Until relatively recently, many people could get to grips with a computer only by attending a university. Now everyone has a smartphone, meaning non-graduates are adept with tech, too. The consequences are clear. In almost every sector of the economy, educational requirements are becoming less strenuous, according to Indeed, a jobs website. America’s professional-and-business services industry employs more people without a university education than it did 15 years ago, even though there are fewer such people around.”
(Hat tip Tyler Cowen)
Americans frequently conflate smartphones with social media, which lowers their popularity. But this is obviously a huge mistake.
Do I even need to talk about how a mid-tier, cheap phone now packs more sensing talent (GPS, gyroscope, barometer, lidar, spectrometer add-ons) than the average university lab had in the 1990s?? Or how you can travel the world with your free translator, have a great camera thinner than a Hemingway novel, and so forth.
After you remember that smartphones and social media can be disentangled, smartphones become not just a good invention, but up there with the printing press and nuclear power. At the very least, slightly underrated for all the hate they get.
Edward Snowden - Forecasted as an American hero, his legacy has unfortunately fallen quite flat. Many Americans still think of him as such, but the flagship program he exposed—Section 215 bulk phone-metadata collection—was already under legal fire and was formally ended in 2015; yet its replacement, Section 702 (internet and cross-border data), remains largely intact and was renewed in 2024. So, major surveillance capabilities survived practically untouched. And it doesn’t seem like Americans have much of a problem with the current levels of surveillance as long as the government doesn’t waste their time with it. (airports…)
And I’m sorry, but the optics of swearing an oath of allegiance to Russia and holding a Russian passport aren’t screaming “Modern American Hero”. Whatever the original plan, the optics hand Moscow a propaganda win and undercut his self-branding. Verdict: Slightly overrated, highly overrated among coastal elites
Nikola Tesla - Modern times’ most mythologized scientist. It’s unfortunate that the inventor of AC electricity has been turned into a cult figure, but that he has. Conspiricists believe he invented infinite, cost-free energy and that this was covered up by various corporate interests in some ingenious rent-seeking plot. Some buy his own claims that he developed a death ray in the 1940s, while others are invested in the idea that Thomas Edison personally saw to his being written out of history. Tesla received the Edison medal! Not one technology of his was ever suppressed. There’s just no evidence for any of it and it’s a shame it’s become wrapped into his popular perception. Overrated.
22nd Amendment (capped presidential term limits) - Slightly overrated at first. Roosevelt had increased presidential power tremendously, but Congress had clawed back power in the past.
They failed this time. The executive branch has only increased in power. This has tipped the scales towards underrated.
And now, with the present administration, I find myself thanking the congressmen who passed this in the 50s more every day.
Verdict: Underrated, increasingly so.
So that’s our list for 2025. What did we get wrong? Share your personal overrated and underrated aspects of America in the comments. Happy Independence Day.
Rare collaborative post today—do read our last one. They’re more irreverent, but we enjoy putting them together:
NYC is better than Norleans, the Mexican-American War is indefensible, no mention of the Philippines for Teddy or the St. Louis (Internment gets a reasonable status as a permanent asterisk in discussions I've seen) for Franky, and NASA funding was terrible. Other than that very good list.
Beli mentioned