American culture clicked for me when I realized just how much of an intelligence disparity there is. Let me explain. I've seen things in America that I've never seen in Canada: people getting in fights with cashiers, insane road rage incidents, fighting cops, and an overall incredible lack of reason. This varies based on where you're at but I'm sure most Americans relate. In Canada, these things just don't happen. You can trust that most people will be on their best behavior and everything runs smoothly. Nobody is going to fight the drugstore security guard, etc. This is solely because Canada funds schools at the provincial level. there is no such thing as a "bad school" in Canada. If you pull someone out of a middle school in rural Manitoba and test them compared to someone in downtown Toronto, they'll perform around the same. Most of America funds schools at a district level using property taxes. If a neighborhood is poor, the school doesn't get funded, which lowers property value, which means the school gets less funding, etc... This creates insane intelligence disparities within cities and neighborhoods. You have people who are incredibly well educated and people who are totally undereducated interacting with each other all the time. This leads to low trust and erratic behavior as the undereducated have trouble navigating complex systems and the well educated don't trust the undereducated. The average American has far more vitriol for their fellow countrymen then the average Canadian. You have a city like San Francisco which has a reading proficiency of 53% (the amount of K-12 students who meet or exceed reading standards), which is above the national and state average. Then 20 mins away you have Oakland which has a reading proficiency of 30%, nearly half the national average. Compare this to Toronto and surrounding cities, all of which hover around 70-80%, all while being the most diverse city in the world with 45% of the population speaking English as a second language. There is a baseline level of social cohesion in Canada that I just don't see in America. I've travelled to the states 4-5 times a year for the past 3-4 years and it always puzzled me why I kept seeing people do insane things and act totally erratic. Maybe I'm off base and someone could add to this, but I feel this is why. It really does just boil down to education. America could solve most of it's income and intelligence inequality in a single generation by mandating that schools must be funded at the state level.