Comment by inglor_cz
4 years ago
"competing to race to the bottom"
Looking at the US in the last 200 years, it has grown enormously rich, while many ossified systems in the world around it have collapsed. It seems that the competition you dislike does not turn individual Americans into paupers. An average American's living standard is so high that it is actually ecologically unsustainable.
The US was excellent at not being in Europe during WWII, and really great at accumulating a massive negative balance of payments for 40 years after the juice from that ran out.
"Not having your factories being bombed" has huge economic upsides.
"Having your factories bombed" is, ironically, a huge motivator too. At the end of the war, Germans had better and more modern industrial equipment than the British, mostly hidden in improvised underground factories. What really suffered was the civilian housing stock, but the average German industrial machine was less than 5 years old - to a surprise of the Allied occupation authorities.
Both Germany and Japan rebuilt their industrial bases to become export juggernauts. And fairly quickly so. Experience with forced improvisation helped.
2 replies →
This reeks of recency bias: 100 years ago, a british gentleman likely said the same about the superiority of the British Empire as proved by its lasting power - now it's a pale shadow of itself, with Brexit sealing its fate.
200 years is a fairly long "recency".
Also, the UK is still a nice place to live, probably nicer than it used to be at the height of the empire - just witness how many people are trying to move there, even ilegally. Large parts of the empire were money sinks, as was the huge navy needed to protect it.
> 200 years is a fairly long "recency".
..and yet Pax Americana isn't 200 years old; and would be very lucky to get there. Which is exactly my point: just because it happened recently doesn't make it particularly notable/superior/longer-lasting conpared to other empires.
That of course applies to the US too. Its current system of empire has its own money sinks