I forgot to mention this above, cause the article doesn’t get into it - medical research. No one in the world comes close to matching us in terms of research into procedures, drugs, etc.
The only possible exception to this is Israel, who has universal health care with good research. But I would hazard a guess that more works only because they’re small, very homogenous, and don’t have the same ideals of freedom/individuality as we do.
Nothing about Israel makes sense. It does function in many ways as a family, which is far different from the typical functioning of a nation-state.
And also Israel (like a lot of countries) gets big foreign aid from us. They can afford to divert money into non-mil stuff when they are subsidized on the mil side