Comment by nosianu

You have a gigantic confounder of general progress, much of it technological.

Just recently I made a post here in some thread to point out that even wein backwards East Germany made huge gains - my grandfather, born early 20th century, lived much, much better even by the end of the GDR compared to when he was born in the Weimar Republic.

Especially food became a non-issue in the modern world, productivity increases were gigantic. The Haber-Bosch process, very important at the start of that development, was not a US invention, nor contingent on anything US related.

It would be hard to disentangle US influence, but one can assume even if the US had not become so dominant, much of those developments would still have taken place, lifting up much of the entire world.