Italy has been politically dysfunctional and divided for a long time. For almost a decade, a corrupt, divisive, populist president, Silvio Berlusconi, made the situation worse. The comparison with the U.S. certainly doesn’t look encouraging.

The U.S. shouldn’t wait and see if current trends persist. Instead, there needs to be a national focus on reducing excessive costs in key industries, improving the population’s health, increasing density in the country’s sprawling cities, upgrading public transit, and reducing corruption and waste in both the public and private sectors. If the U.S. wants to remain a developed country, it should try to look and act more like one.

Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

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