Twenty-seven years of living in the USA and traveling & working across most of the 50 States enabled me to understand how in a complex modern society, so many things are tangled together than attempting reform in any one area is impossible. Rather like in a dysfunctional family, the attempt to improve any one area results in all the other areas acting as a brake.

When we look at education, there are multiple reasons why the USA is near the bottom of the PISA table, and each reason reinforces all the others. Not the least of the problems is that the Republican Party depends on ignorant stupid people for the vast majority of its votes and so has an overwhelming interest in ensuring the ongoing collapse of even basic education. And although low-IQ voters in blue-collar jobs are the ones most harmed by Republican policies that uniformly favor the very rich, they are also the voters least likely ever to realize they're being played for dupes.

Meanwhile on the Democratic side, vacuous political posturing, teachers' unions that firmly resist all attempts to improve the educational system, and parents voting for low city taxes mean that reform is equally blocked.

The USA is a clear example of why representative democracy is totally unfit for purpose. But thanks to our unthinking belief that it is "the best possible system of government" we can be 100% certain that the decline will continue until we've reached a condition of overt tyranny.

But don't worry - it's not as if Putin's Russia shows us this outcome is such a bad thing...